- Count Stanislas
Clermont-Tonnerre
to the French Assembly, October 12, 1789

"Peace in Palestine cannot be achieved by force,
but only through understanding."

- Albert Einstein

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but
in ourselves, that we are underlings."

- William
Shakespeare

To Christians, Jews, Muslims and
Non-Believers, living and dead, who have had
not only the courage to place their concern
for mankind above their allegiance to any
group or sect but also the willingness to do
battle in behalf of this conviction.

- Alfred M.
Lilienthal

I
II
III

IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X

XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV

XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XV

Contents

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE. THE ORIGINAL SIN
Sixty-seven Words: One Man's Dream, Another's Nightmare
America Picks Up the Torch
The Creation of Israel Revisited

PART TWO. THE COVER-UP
Inside Israel
What Palestinians?
The Jewish Connection: Numbers Don't Count
Whose Congress: Thwarting the National Interest
Slanting the Myth-Information
Numero Uno: The New York Times
Terror: The Double Standard

PART THREE. THE COVER-OVER
Exploiting Anti-Semitism
The Blitz
The Holocaust: Stoking the Fires
Christians in Bondage
Soviet Jewry: Blackmail and Barter

PART FOUR. POLITICS OR POLICY
The Eisenhower, Kennedy. and Johnson Years
The Attack on Liberty
Oil on Troubled Waters: The Nixon Years
War Again
The Ford Interlude
Exit Henry Kissinger?
Enter Carter-and Then Begin
Reagan and Still Begin
The Ultimate Dichotomy: Israel Über Alles?
Conclusion: Toward Justice and Then Peace

Last Word
Notes
Index

1

9
29
46

103
146
206
239
271
314
357

403
421
460
486
513

535
561
577
614
631
664
679
724
743
776

806
811
877

Introduction

IF SOME COMPELLING justification was
required for bringing a most controversial book, with a most
unorthodox approach, before a world in which the human psyche has
become far more attuned to the pleasant process of being softly
lulled by Big Brother than to the painstaking task of absorbing
upsetting, nonconsensus material, then the astounding November 19-20,
1977, pilgrimage of Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat to Jerusalem
supplied the reason. The Middle East imbroglio, always complex, had
now become "curiouser and curiouser," to borrow words from Alice in
Wonderland.

Euphoric Americans clung to their video sets
over that weekend. Sadat was addressing the Knesset--Egyptians and
Israelis were not only talking to one another, but smiling. The
"A-rabs" were at last willing to give up war. Peace, surely, must be
on the way.

This wishful thinking of course overlooked
the fact that since 1948 there had been two wars going on
simultaneously in the Middle East. The one between Israel and the
Arab states was only a secondary consequence of what Syrian President
Hafez al-Assad has called the "mother question"-the conflict between
the Israeli Zionists and the Arab Palestinians. While there was some
possibility of a separate agreement ending the Egyptian-Israeli war,
a solution for the core of the dangerous Holy Land conflict seemed as
distant as ever.

The November 10, 1975, U.N. resolution
equated Zionism with racism and racial discrimination, and for the
first time placed the genesis of the continuing Middle East struggle
squarely before a startled American public. But fervent supporters of
Israel, Christians as well as Jews, reacted with unprecedented furor
to the overwhelming U.N. censure and stirred the media to direct an
equally unprecedented onslaught against the U.N., the Arab states,
and the Third World bloc. The supporters of the resolution were
denigrated with the charge "emulators of Hitler." The pro-Israel
American public was led to believe that this was indeed but another
attack on Jews and Judaism, a Nazi renaissance. The pertinency of
this U.N. action to the continuing Arab rejection of the State of
Israel was totally covered over by whipped-up
emotionalism.

What is Zionism, and what is its connection
with the Middle East conflict? How, if at all, is it differentiated
from Judaism? Why has Organized Jewry, invariably an unequivocal
exponent of the separation of church and state, condoned their union
in an Israeli state demanding the allegiance of everyone everywhere
who considers himself a Jew, whether he be an observant practitioner
or not? What validity is there to the insistence of a persistent
minority that anti-Zionism is the equivalent of anti-Semitism? Such
questions may mystify 90 percent of Americans, yet the answers go to
the very heart of the Middle East conflict.

It was the serious confusion between
religion and nationalism that led directly to the 1948 establishment
of the Zionist state of Israel in the heart of the Arab world,
causing disastrous consequences for all concerned, including
Americans whose government had played a major role in that
nation-making. The resultant uprooting of Palestinian Arabs, whose
numbers today have swollen to more than 1.6 million, many exiled for
thirty years to refugee camps living on a U.N. dole of seven cents
per day, brought down on the U.S. the enmity of an Arab-Muslim world,
eroding a measureless reservoir of goodwill stemming from the
educational and eleemosynary institutions America helped found. The
creation of Israel, likewise, led to the penetration of the area for
the first time by the Soviet Union, endangered the security interests
of the U.S., and thrust the burden of a premature energy crisis into
every American home.

However much the essence of Judaism may have
remained as distinct as ever from Zionism, the nationalist shadow has
so overtaken the religious substance that virtually all Jews have, in
practice, become Israelists, if not Zionists. Many who mistrust the
Zionist connotation can still have their cake and eat it, through
Israelism.

While the vast majority of Jews in the
Diaspora (the aggregate of Jews living outside of Palestine) do not
believe in Zionist ideology, out of what is mistaken for religious
duty they have given fullest support, bordering on worship, to
Israel. Such worship of collective human power is just about as old
as Pharaonic Egypt, and was practiced by the Sumerians, pre-Christian
Greeks, and Romans as well. As Dr. Arnold Toynbee pointed out in A
Study of History.

The prevalence of this worship of
collective human power is a calamity. It is a bad religion because
it is the worship of a false god. It is a form of idolatry which
has led its adherents to commit innumerable crimes and follies.
Unhappily, the prevalence of this idolatrous religion is one of
the tragic facts of contemporary human life.

And these Jewish Zionists-Israelists have
been joined by a large segment of articulate Christian opinion in the
new worship of the State of Israel, which has been accorded the same
privileges and immunities that have been vouchsafed to religionists
who follow a genuine faith.

On every other issue of concern to
Americans, both sides have invariably been publicly presented, no
matter how controversial: the cigarette lobby vs. cancer research,
the drug alarmists vs. the upholders of pot, traditionalists-oldsters
vs. Beatles-hippies, civil rights gradualists vs. extremists, hawks
and doves over Vietnam, pro-Watergate outcome vs. Nixon apologists-to
mention but a few. It has only been on the subject of Jews, Zionism,
and Israel that the U.S. and most of the Western world have had a
near-total blackout. The mere presence of the powerful
Anti-Defamation League, even before the fearsome "anti-Semitic" label
might be brandished, has imparted a sensitivity so powerful as to
smother any idea of private discussion, let alone public debate, on
the grave issues involved.

The record of pressures, suppression, and
terrorization practiced against many-including Presidents of the
U.S., who in undisclosed memoranda, letters, and documents have
entertained serious doubts about the course upon which Zionism has
embarked-is massive and yet incomplete. The more submissive of the
Victims of Jewish nationalist pressure have usually been either too
ashamed or too afraid to publicize their experiences.

Rarely has the deceit of so few been so
widely practiced to the disastrous detriment of so many, as in the
formulation and implementation of U.S. Middle East policy. Guilt,
fear, and the preoccupation with domestic politics rather than
consideration of policy, justice, and security interests have molded
the direction of the deep U.S. involvement. And if John Q. Citizen
was unmindful of what was really taking place, it was largely due to
the inordinate power of the media to penetrate the inner sanctum of
every home with its slantings, distortions, and myth-information.
"T'ain't people's ignorance," as Artemus Ward once quipped, "that
does the harm, 'tis their knowin' so much that ain't so." Barnum
notwithstanding, the media has been able to fool the people most, if
not all, of the time.

The Watergate cover-up has to play second
fiddle to the concealments in the Middle East fiasco for more than
thirty years, involving, as it has, the continuous serious threat to
world peace manifested by four regional wars and three serious Big
Power confrontations, which only narrowly missed becoming World War
III. The stationing of American technicians in the Sinai to help
supervise the second Egyptian-Israeli disengagement accord may have
been a step in the making of a new Vietnam. "One day," predicted a
senior U.S. diplomat, according to Newsweek magazine, "there will be
a congressional investigation into how we lost the Middle East that
will make the great China debate seem trivial."

This book, it is hoped, will contribute to a
great Middle East debate that should take place before, rather than
after, catastrophe strikes again in that already harassed portion of
the globe. Certain basic questions require. answers: "Whose legal and
moral claim to Palestine is stronger, the Israeli Zionists or the
Arab Palestinians? How, if at all, may these claims be reconciled?
How may the U.S. protect its vast political and economic stake in the
area and simultaneously continue to foster its special, unique
relationship with Israel? Will the undeniable, overwhelming public
statement of "never again," as to another Vietnam, be meticulously
regarded in our pursuit of Middle East peace? And above all, this
clincher: Will President Reagan and his policy advisers cease
avoiding and openly face the central issue in the entire problem--not
the existence of an Israeli state, nor even the nonexistence of a
Palestinian state, but the kind of a state Israel has to become so as
to bring lasting peace to the area?

For some time it has been apparent that
someone would have to assume the burden of carefully examining the
historical record of the Arab-Israeli conflict, starting with the
"original sin" in uprooting the indigenous Arab Palestinians, and
daring to articulate conclusions seldom aired. As Norman Thomas once
observed, one of the Jewish faith is perhaps able to speak with "the
necessary moral authority that no Gentile can express."

However strong the temptation may be for any
author to succumb to the prevailing mood of his surroundings and to
indulge in indiscriminate stereotyping, heightened by cliche's and
slogans, I have tried to maintain a fair perspective and not to allow
personal experiences to dull the observer's vision, nor instill too
deep-seated a passion. It is out of sadness, not anger, that I am
forced to conclude that in embarking upon the new path that Organized
Jewry has hewn for it, prophetic Judaism has incurred an incalculable
loss in moral values, which author Moshe Menuhin has described as
"the Decadence of Judaism in Our Times." What else can account for
the anomaly by which the once-persecuted have adopted the philosophy
of their chief persecutor?

In doling out incarceration and death while
sweeping through conquered Europe, did not the Führer undo the
laws of emancipation for which so many Jews had so long struggled, as
he decreed: "You are not a German, you are a Jew-you are not a
Frenchman, you are a Jew, you are not a Belgian, you are a Jew"? Yet
these are the identical words that Zionist leaders have been intoning
as they have meticulously promoted the in-gathering to Israel
(Palestine) of Jews from around the globe, even plotting their exodus
from lands in which they have lived happily for centuries.

If at times this book seems unduly critical
of Israel, and neglects to place in balance the oft-repeated
arguments in its favor, it is simply because the gigantic propaganda
apparatus of Israel-World Zionism has spun such extensive and deeply
ingrained mythology that there is hardly enough space to refute
widely accepted theses and expose the picture as it really is. The
reader, however, is particularly cautioned to keep in mind at all
times the very vital distinction between the State of Israel and the
people of Israel. Nor can he overlook the fact that one of Western
man's most precious possessions is the inalienable right to dissent.
As Thomas Jefferson expressed it, "For God's sake, let us freely hear
both sides."

This new, updated paperback edition has been
published as an answer to the widespread demand to learn more about
the untold side of a subject, the understanding of which may be vital
to man's very existence.

In giving fair consideration to what to many
will come as an astounding recital, my readers are asked to display
what William Ellery Channing once defined as the free
mind:

"I call that mind free which
jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls
no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or
hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may
come, and which receives new truth as an angel from
heaven."

- AL

Part Two. The Cover-Up

X Terror: The Double Standard

And so, to
the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right
and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race
that can understand.

- George Bernard Shaw. Caesar and Cleopatra

IT IS NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE to pick out the one
particular subject of Middle East reportage the media has most slanted and
distorted. But certainly the manner in which the use of violence has been
presented probably has had the most influence in formulating American public
opinion.

The media has succeeded in getting Western man to accept a double standard:
one, that Jews and Zionists have been freedom fighters in pursuit of a moral,
legal, historical imperative, namely, the establishment of their own state,
Israel. On the other hand, the media has stressed that when Palestinians
resorted to armed violence to regain their homeland, they were terrorists.
Whereas the Hitler experience was readily invoked to condone Zionist intemperate
acts, the desperate frustration of being deprived of their homes for thirty
years, and any hearing for their grievances, was deemed no excuse for
Palestinian excesses.1 The choice of words
and pejorative adjectives, the shadings, the explanatory material spelling out
the particular incident, and the amount of sympathy employed in describing the
victims were all instrumentalities in applying this double standard.

As an example, few voices were allowed to be heard in dissent of the totally
accepted Zionist labeling given the October war. One of these appeared on WEEI,
the CBS outlet in Boston, three days after the fighting erupted. Following four
callers, who were to varying degrees pro-Israel, the moderator introduced a
soft-spoken voice unmistakably Indian or Pakistani, who complained of the use of
slanted language by the reporters. He stated that the moderator had no right
[357] [358] to call the war an act of aggression when all Egypt and Syria were
trying to do was get back their own territory. Moderator Howard Nelson tried
unsuccessfully to rebut the gentleman by reading the dictionary meaning of the
word "aggression," totally refusing to take into consideration the initial 1967
Israeli seizure of Arab lands. The persistent questioner countered by pointing
to the persistent media slanting. "Why is it, when Israelis hijack a Lebanese
plane and force it to land in Israel, newscasters call it a 'diversion,' but
when the Palestinians engage in air thievery, it is called 'hijacking.' Why," he
asked again, "is there this double standard?"

A study 2 made of U.S. press reportage
showed that although all acts of terrorism were generally bemoaned, Israeli
actions were usually justified as responses to 'intolerable situations." The
Washington Post, for example, justified the 1973 Israeli assassinations in
Beirut as "the best kind of terrorism," since they killed "the worst kind of
terrorists."3 In editorials dealing with
the commandos, 95.2 percent of the coverage by the New York Times, 91 percent by
the Washington Post, and 100 percent by the Detroit Free Press was against
commando terrorist activity. While condemning the commandos, the Times did
manage to publish three features indicating sympathy for the plight of the
Palestinian refugees as refugees. The Washington Post had three editorials and
one feature on the refugee problem.

Under rules of the media, the Israelis are "freedom fighters" and the Arabs
are "terrorists," the Israelis "make reprisals" while the Palestinians "commit
atrocities," the Arabs constantly stand vilified, the Israelis glorified. As
stated in an October 1968 "Letter to Christians" signed by sixty-six ministers
from nine denominations:

Westerners in general are already aware of what the Israeli feels: pride
that he is once more, after so long, master in Palestine, where he no longer
need apologize for being Jewish. But Westerners are not so aware of what the
Arab feels: resentment at losing his land, humiliation at military losses,
frustration at being unable to make his claims understood to the rest of the
world....... Westerners should understand that the Arabic term for the
underground fighters,fedayeen, means "those who sacrifice themselves," and
that the Arabs compare them to the underground fighters in Europe during the
Nazi occupation.4

This double standard came into play long ago and slowly permeated reporting
from the outset of the struggle in Palestine, helping to mold the popular
impression of events there. Most people became conditioned to believe that it
was the Arabs alone who resorted to [359] violence. But the record of the
Zionist use of violence in behalf of their cause, carefully blacked out from
public surveillance,5 is a lengthy one
that could be traced back to the days of the British mandate.

Violence was often used against their own, as on November 25, 1940, when the
S.S. Patria was blown up in the Haifa harbor, killing 276 illegal Jewish
immigrant passengers. At the time of the incident these deaths were attributed
to the British, and it was not until ten years later that the responsibility for
this disaster was placed at the door of the Zionists. David Flinker, Israeli
correspondent of the Jewish Morning Journal (the largest Yiddish daily)
described what had happened:

It was then that the Haganah General Staff took a decision at which their
leaders shuddered. The decision was not to permit the Patria to leave Jaffa.
The English must be given to understand that Jews could not be driven away
from their own country. The Patria must be blown up. The decision was
conveyed to Haganah members on the Patria and in the hush of night,
preparations had begun for the execution of the tragic act. On Sunday,
November 26, 1940, the passengers were informed by the English that they
were being returned to sea. The Jews remained silent, save for a whisper
from man to man to go "up the deck, all up the deck." Apparently, the signal
did not reach everybody, for many hundreds remained below-never to see the
light again. Suddenly an explosion was heard and a panic ensued.... It was a
hellish scene; people jumped into the water, children were tossed into the
waves; agonizing cries tore the heavens. The number of victims was
officially placed at 276. The survivors were permitted by the High
Commissioner to land.6

Fifteen months later the S.S. Struma exploded in the Black Sea, killing 769
illegal Jewish immigrants. The Jewish Agency described it as an act
of"mass-protest and mass-suicide," and the U.S. media once more placed the
responsibility for these deaths at the door of the British and their Palestine
immigration policy.

There followed the assassination in Cairo on November 6, 1944, of Lord Moyne,
the British Minister Resident; the Irgun's blowing up of the King David Hotel in
Jerusalem, killing ninety-one and injuring forty-five British and Arabs
(subsequent evidence indicated the involvement of the Haganah and the Jewish
Agency), and the 1947 dispatch of letter bombs to British Cabinet Ministers and
the bomb attacks of December 11, in and near Haifa, killing eighteen Arabs and
wounding fifty-eight others. In subsequent years the Arab-owned Semiramis Hotel
in Jerusalem was blown up, killing twenty persons, among them the Viscount de
Tapia, the Spanish Consul. The Haganah admitted responsibility for the outrage.
360

In 1948, following the adoption of the U.N. partition resolution but prior to
the May 15 promulgation of the Israeli state, Irgun, Stern Gang,7 or Haganah
terrorists repeatedly struck with bombs, loads of explosives, or even armed
forces at Arab civilians in villages, towns, and cities. The grossest outrage,
of course, was the April 9 massacre at Deir Yassin of 254 women, children, and
old men.

On September 17, 1948, U.N. Palestine
Mediator Count Folke Bernadotte, nephew of Swedish King Gustav V, and his aide,
Colonel Andre Pierre Serot, were assassinated by members of the Stern Gang while
driving in the Israeli-controlled sector of Jerusalem. American Ambassador
Stanton Griffis, convinced that the identity of the assassin was well known to
the Israeli government, commented in his memoirs: "The murder of Bernadotte will
remain forever a black and disgraceful mark on the early history of Israel."8

During a February 1977 press conference marking the publication in Israel of
a new book on David Ben-Gurion, The Secret List of Heinrich Roehm, it was
definitely admitted by author Dr. Michael Bar Zohar (writing in the U.S. under
the name of Michael Barak) that the late Prime Minister had the names of the
three who had carried out the assassination; one of them, Yehoshva Zeitler, was
one of Ben-Gurion's best friends.9 Zeitler
explained that "we executed Bernadotte because he was a one-man institution who
endangered the status of Jerusalem by his declared intention of turning her into
an international city. He was hostile to Israel from the moment the state was
established and actually laid the foundation for the present U.N. policy of
supporting the Arabs." The decision to kill Count Bernadotte had been taken by
three Stern Gang leaders, Nathan Yelin-Mor, Dr. Israel Eldad-Scheib, and
Zeitler, commander of activities in Jerusalem and an intimate friend of the
first Prime Minister.

In 1950 Zionist agents in Baghdad threw bombs at a synagogue and at other
Jewish targets in order to pressure Jews into emigrating to Israel. In 1953 the
small Jordanian hamlets of Kibya and Nahalin, and the UNRWA refugee camp at
Bureij in the Gaza Strip, were attacked; 102 villagers and refugees were killed.
Between 1952 and September 1956, prior to the first Suez war, the Arab villages
of Beit Jalu, Falame, Rantis, Bani Suhaila, Baheya, Gharandal, Wadi Fukin, and
Gaza were shelled on raids, killing 118 civilians.

A few hours after the Israeli army began its march into Sinai on October 29,
1956, a curfew from 5 P.M. to 6 A.M. was imposed on Kafr Kassem and other
villages of the Little Triangle within Israel. This curfew advance of one hour
was transmitted at 4:45 P.M. to the Mayor of the village, who informed the
Israeli officer in charge that a large number of villagers were working in the
fields and could not be notified of the change; forty-nine villagers returning
after 5 P.M., including fourteen women and small children in the arms of their
mothers, were mowed down without any warning whatsoever by machine guns as they
came in from their work.

These facts, suppressed for a long time, seeped through when the border
policemen were finally brought to trial. The proceedings lasted more than two
years, and the Israeli High Court passed light sentences: one officer received
seventeen years, another fifteen years, three were acquitted, and five
constables received sentences of seven years. All were set free one year later
by government amnesty. And from the ever intensely active libertarian-human
rights movement in the U.S., only silence. Identical reaction followed the 1966
Israeli armed force attack, including tanks and armored cars, practically wiping
out the small Jordanian village of Es-Samu'a, killing eighteen and wounding
fifty-four others.

By 1972, with the emergence of the PLO movement, Israeli espionage agencies
concentrated their attention on individual Palestinians, who were struck down by
letter bombs, regular bombs, and machine guns in Beirut,10
Los Angeles,11 Rome,
12 Tripoli ,'8
Stockholm, 14 Copenhagen,15
Paris,16 Cyprus,17
and in Oslo.18

The task of seeking out and destroying Palestinians known to be connected
with recurring fedayeen attacks on Israelis rested with the Mossad, the Israeli
version of the CIA, known familiarly as the "Institute." A special branch within
Mossad, set up in 1972, had been responsible for the April 10, 1973, raid on
Lebanon and the assassination of the three PLO leaders, Kamal Nasser, Mohammed
Yusuf Najjar, and Kamal Adwan. The meticulously executed operation was part of a
plan, "Operation: God's Wrath," under the command of Prime Minister Meir's
Special Adviser on Security Affairs, General Aharon Yariv, whose goal had been
the elimination of the 1,000 Palestinians capable of providing leadership to the
movement. The elimination of this select number, it was thought, would liquidate
the movement itself. And the outbreak of fierce fighting in Lebanon's civil war
in the spring of 1975 facilitated other raids by the Israeli secret service,
which soon added twenty-three victims to its roster.19

Starting with the December 28, 1968, helicopter raid on the Beirut Airport,
Lebanon was the continuous site for Israeli attacks on civilians and civilian
targets, most of which occurred in the south of the country. These commenced
with a number of small raids in 1969 and 1970,[362] reported to the U.N. but
generally ignored. In 1972 the Israeli armed forces began their serious raids
with an attack on the Arkoub region, in which two civilians were killed; on the
Nabatiyeh refugee camp, in which ten were killed; on Nahr al-Bared and Rafed and
Rashaya-al Wadi camps, causing the deaths of sixteen; on Baddawi and Nahr-al
Bared, killing twelve.

In April 1974 six South Lebanese villages were attacked by Israeli armed
forces, and in May the village of Kfeir was bombed with four persons killed,
including a woman and her seven-year-old daughter. Eleven days later Israeli
planes again raided the refugee camp of Nabatiyeh and that of Ein-el-Helweh as
well, killing fifty and wounding 200, and completely obliterating the former
Palestinian site. On the 19th of the same month, Israeli naval units bombarded
the Rashidiyeh refugee camp, killing eight civilians. The next month the Israeli
planes returned to bomb three U.N. camps, killing seventy-three and wounding
159. In July Israeli naval units raided Tyre, Sarafund, and Saida, sinking
twenty-one fishing boats. The aerial bombing and ground raids of Lebanese towns
and U.N. refugee camps in the south of the country continued into 1975.

The idealization of Zionist terror, far beyond mere condonation, assumed its
inexorable course when twenty-two-year-old Egyptian Jew Eliahu Betzouri and his
seventeen-year-old friend Eliahu Hakim slew Lord Moyne in 1944. Years after the
conviction, David Ben-Gurion admitted "his reverence for the dedicated patriots
who were hanged in Cairo" for this assassination of Great Britain's Resident
Minister. (Israel's first Prime Minister also referred to terrorist Abraham
Stern, the poet who founded the group bearing his name, as "one of the finest
and most outstanding figures of the era.")

The reportage on the trial by such illustrious newsmen of the day as the
Times' C.L. Sulzberger, AP's Relman Morin, and UP's Samir Souki featured the
defense counsel and the defendants' condemnation of the British administration
for graft, anarchistic rule, and acts of injustice. Popular sympathy was
established in the U.S. with the young "heroes," even though in his House of
Commons eulogy of the slain British Minister of State, Prime Minister Winston
Churchill referred to "the shameful crime" and boldly declared: "If our dreams
for Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins' guns and our labors for its
future to produce only a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, then many
like myself will have to reconsider the position we have maintained so
consistently and so long in the past." No wonder that political adviser to the
Jewish Agency Leo Cohen, after listening to the Churchill BBC broadcast, stated:
[363]

When I think how proud we have been that Zionism could come before the world
with clean hands as a creative movement of the highest order, and when I
think of what those boys have been led to do... it is something so
exasperating, so awful and dreadful.

But Churchill's reassessment never reached fruition, and the Western world's
honeymoon with Zionism continued. Chaim Weizmann had written at the time to
Churchill: "I can assure you that Palestine Jewry will, as its representative
bodies have declared, go to the utmost limits of its power to cut out, root and
branch, this evil from its midst."20 Two
years after that assurance, the Anglo~American Committee of Inquiry in its
report was still requesting the Jewish Agency "to resume active cooperation with
the Mandatory Authority in the suppression of terrorism and of illegal
immigration and in the maintenance of that law and order throughout Palestine
which is essential for the good of all, including the new immigrants."21

Author Gerold Frank, who ghosted Bartley Crum's Behind the Silken Curtain and
Jorge Garcia-Granados' The Birth of Israel, both extremely pro-Israel books, had
the final word to say in his elegy to the Moyne assassins in his book, The Deed:
22

Here in the remote corner [the cemetery of Bassatin which contains the
bodies of such great Jews as Moses Maimonides], amid the debris and neglect
of ages one finds a single square stone, not large~two feet high, three feet
wide-no names on it, but in Hebrew "pray for their souls." Beneath it,
Eliahu Hakim and Eliahu Betzouri sleep together, as they were buried in one
coffin, curled in each other's arms as children. They lie curled together
like sleeping children under the eternal stone. No one guards their grave
now. The sands of the desert blow, nothing grows there, and no weeds, no
foliage. Only the sifting, creeping yellow dust over everything, and in the
cloudless sky a molten sun. In the ancient earth in the nameless grave they
lie together under the imperishable stone. Few remember them now.

This is how the people have been prepared to accept Zionist acts of violence
and to judge the continuing conflict. Thus when the Irgun led by Menachem Begin
25 blew up the King David Hotel and some
of his followers were apprehended, the compassionate but often misled Eleanor
Roosevelt wrote to Lady Reading, a friend in England: "If these young people are
killed, there will be without any question a sense of martyrdom and a desire for
revenge which will only bring more bloodshed. A generous gesture will, I think,
change the atmosphere."

A special variation on the double standard is to be seen in the handling of
espionage activities by the Israelis and their Arab counterparts. [364] [365] As
to the Israeli cause, the end always justifies the means. The Zionists and
Israelis are admired no matter what dirty tricks they use, often by the very
people who are the first to condemn the use of "dirty tricks" at home, by the
CIA or other American intelligence-espionage agencies. The Zionists and Israelis
are allowed to break all the rules of international law, and to make their own.
The kidnapping of Adolph Eichmann from Argentina was only the best publicized of
many instances of how the Israelis have been able to get away with defying
international edict. Imagine if the CIA were to kidnap some wanted criminal for
crimes against the American people! Imagine if the Arabs were to abduct an
Israeli for crimes against the Palestinians! Yet so long as it is Jews,
Israelis, Zionists - everything goes.

This has long been true in the attitudes toward Israeli spies. One of the
major instances of this, now forgotten by most of the few people who ever knew
about it, was the Lavon Affair that once rocked Israel to the very core.

After the Egyptian revolution of 1952, relations between the U.S. and the new
Gamal Abdel Nasser government steadily improved. Cultural and economic
agreements between Egypt and other Arab states and the U.S. were being
discussed, and it was sincerely hoped that the U.S. would aid the projected
Aswan Dam development program. By 1954 American Ambassador Henry Byroade's
personal friendship with Nasser seemed likely to produce results. A U.S. aid
program of $50 million had been started.

The situation was viewed in high Israeli quarters as a grave threat to the
continued flow of American dollars into Israel from public, if not private,
sources. A direct severance of relations between Egypt and the U.S. was deemed
desirable. An Israeli espionage ring was sent to Egypt to bomb official U.S.
offices and, if necessary, attack American personnel working there so as to
destroy Egyptian-U.S. relations and eventually Arab-U.S. ties. The creation of
simulated anti-British incidents was calculated to induce the British to
maintain their Suez garrison. Several bomb incidents involving U.S.
installations in Egypt followed.

Small bombs shaped like books and secreted in book covers were brought into
the USIA libraries in both Alexandria and Cairo. Fish skin bags filled with acid
were placed on top of nitroglycerin bombs; it took several hours for the acid to
eat through the bag and ignite the bomb. The book bombs were placed in the
shelves of the library just before closing hours. Several hours later a blast
would occur, shattering glass and shelves and setting fire to books and
furniture. Similar bombs were placed in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Theater and in
other American owned business buildings.24

In December two young Jewish Egyptian boys carrying identical bombs were
caught as they were about to enter U.S. installations. Upon their confession, a
sabotage gang of six other Jews was rounded up. Five more were implicated in the
plot. The conspirators, who received sentences ranging from fifteen years to
life, were the objects in the U.S. of multifold sympathetic editorials and
articles. Nothing appeared in print at the time to refute the image that this
had been but another Nasser conspiracy to unite his country against Israel. The
cry "anti-Semitism" widely reverberated.

In 1960 an investigation in Israel called attention to the forgery of an
important document in what had been announced as a "security mishap" that had
precipitated the resignation of Pinhas Lavon as Minister of Defense in 1955.
Shimon Peres, then Deputy Minister of Defense, and Moshe Dayan had, with the
forgery, attempted to place the legal responsibility for the unsuccessful 1954
sabotage attempt at Lavon's door. Ben-Gurion had fought the reopening of the
case, but a subsequent rehearing revealed that Lavon had been an innocent victim
of the machinations of Peres, Dayan, and Brigadier Abraham Givli.

Even though the army, through censorship, attempted to cover up its own
blunders, the affair led to a Cabinet crisis and the resignation of the
Ben-Gurion government in 1961. As late as December 29, 1960, the Times was still
referring to the scandal only as "a disastrous adventure in 1954." As the
already abnormal ties between Israel and the U.S. grew stronger, scant attention
was paid to the disclosure in Israel of this blatant attempt to torpedo
U.S.-Arab relations.

In 1971 one of the spies who figured in the Lavon Affair, Marcelle Ninio,
broke into the headlines of Israel and of the satellite Israeli press in the
U.S. Ninio, the only woman involved in the affair that so rocked the political
life of Israel, had been exchanged for Egyptian prisoners of war after the June
1967 war, along with Victor Levy, Robert Dassa, and Philip Nathanson, her
cosaboteurs, and "Champagne Spy" Wolfgang Lotz, who had been apprehended in 1965
after four years of spying in Egypt. According to a five-paragraph story in the
New York Times of November 16, 1971, Premier Golda Meir was to attend the
wedding of a girl "who at the age of 16 was convicted of espionage for Israel
and spent 10 years in an Egyptian jail." The Lavon Affair was referred to as a
"mysterious sabotage mission inside Egypt" in 1954, about which "full details
remain a secret." [366] [367]

The entire tone of the article suggested innocence on the part of Israel and
of the bride-to-be. It had been just another case of those "hating Egyptians"
trying to put a spy rap on a nice Jewish girl. The New York Post carried a
four-column story on page 4, "Israeli Heroine to Marry," and referred to the
"dark-haired woman who spent fifteen years in a Cairo prison for alleged
sabotage activities."

Both newspapers slanted the reportage, withholding undisputed facts in this
true spy story. Although the so-called "heroine" had been deeply involved in
proven espionage, seventeen years later the same "editorial papers" were
compounding the felony they had originally committed. To avoid presenting the
established facts of Israeli sabotage against the U.S., which had involved
Israeli Cabinet ministers Dayan and Peres, the Times covered up the affair in
this fashion: "The mission quickly was shown to be a far-fetched idea."

When Israeli spy Elie Cohen, alias Kamal Amin Tabas, was uncovered by Syrian
intelligence and hanged in Damascus, an angry hue and cry arose in the West, led
by the media with photos (front page of the New York Times) of the condemned's
body hanging in the public square. Two popular books, Our Man in Damascus 25 by
Eli Ben-Hanan and The Silent Warriors 26
by Joshua Tadmor translated from the Hebrew by Israeli Ha'aretz. U.S.
correspondent Raphael Rothstein, made a martyr of the spy (the latter tome was
dedicated ironically enough to Elie Wiesel, the godfather of anti-anti-Semitism)
and attacked the lack of a fair trial to which the press was not admitted. In
the course of their glorification of the Israeli superspy, the authors
unwittingly further proved his guilt. Cohen had been arrested in Egypt as part
of the Lavon Affair spy ring but held only for two years, released, and then had
joined Israel's Secret Service as a trained espionage agent with Damascus to be
the base of his operations. As an Oriental Jew he was fluent in Arabic and was
scarcely distinguishable from any Muslim or Christian Arab. Most of the
important Israeli spies were Arab Jews.

Cohen cleverly worked his way into affluent social and political circles in
Damascus, even becoming acquainted with General Amin el-Hafez, who was to come
into power in March 1963. Through his contacts Cohen was able to ascertain the
number, type, and placement of MIG-21 planes, T-54 tanks, and other Soviet
armament, which Syria was receiving from the Soviet Union, as well as Damascus
plans for the construction of a canal as counterdiversion of the Daniyas, one of
the principal sources of the Jordan River.

The incalculably invaluable information smuggled out to Israel until his
apprehension was an important factor in his country's success in the six-day
war. This was never alluded to in any way by the American press in their
accounts of the "martyred" spy. But author Rothstein sharply pointed this up:
"Now the peaceful Golan Heights, where Russian tanks lie rusting and concrete
fortifications are piles of rubble, is a tourist attraction, and much of the
credit for this turn of events belongs to Israel's silent hero, Elie Cohen."

In the fall of 1972 the major capitals in Europe, the Middle East, and the
U.S. were rocked by a spate of letter and package bombs. This phase of the
lethal-letter war opened with the letter-bomb killing of an Israeli diplomat in
his London office. Coming on the heels of the Munich tragedy, biased world
public opinion was only too ready to believe that these acts had been the
responsibility of the Palestinian Black September group, although the strict
security watch at the Israeli Embassy had intercepted seven other letters, only
one of which contained a leaflet boasting Black September sponsorship. Upon
close examination it remained very much of an open question who had been sending
what bombs to whom.

According to neutral observers in Britain, while the popular press tended to
lean sympathetically toward the Israelis, "the serious press was more objective.
After the thirteen letter bombs intercepted in London in November, British Jewry
was talking of retribution, but so far as can be seen, there is no evidence to
support the theory that Black September is behind the current wave of
incidents." British writers, including those of the London Times, viewed
evidence of the Palestinian complicity as "uneasy." Yet in the U.S. there was no
indecision. The minds of the public were made up for them by the American press
and the politicians, although a New York City episode took on the aura of a
Hitchcock movie gone awry.

In October, letter bombs addressed to two retired officials of Hadassah
(Women's Zionist Organization) were discovered when they failed to detonate.
Mrs. Rose Halprin, who had not been president since 1952, allegedly received one
at her East Side home. There were fifteen Halprins in the 1972 Manhattan
telephone directory, eighteen in the edition a year earlier. There was no
listing for Rose Halprin. It was difficult to understand how a group of
Palestinians 5,000 miles away could ever have obtained her name let alone her
address.

The second letter had been addressed to a one-time executive director (one
newspaper referred to her as Hannah Goldberg and another as Mrs. Hannah
Rosenberg) and was opened under police supervision without it exploding.27
Following the apprehension of the letter bombs addressed to the New York women,
Mayor John Lindsay [368] [369] released this statement: "Terror by mail is the
latest, and in some ways, the most vicious technique yet devised by conspirators
against Israel. To direct it at two outstanding ladies of Hadassah here reaches
a low in the politics of terror."

At the same time a number of letter bombs sent to the Israeli Mission to the
U.N. were also intercepted. (One of these was supposedly addressed to a diplomat
not even as yet listed in the U.N. directory.) A spokesman for the Israeli
Embassy was quick to be quoted:' The letters sent to New York show that the
terrorist organization is not just anti-Israeli, as they claim, but anti-Jewish
throughout the world." And to further this impression that the Palestinians
posed a threat to all Jews, two letter bombs, also mailed from Penang, appeared
in Rhodesia, sent to residents of Bulawayo. One had been addressed to prominent
young Zionist leader Colin Raizon, another to the mother of Rhodesian Olympic
weight lifter John Orkin. Both were intercepted by the police.

Was it more than a coincidence that the letter bombs, sent to the Hadassah
and to the Israeli Mission, all of which were intercepted, were received at a
time when Israel was doing its best to coordinate its efforts with those of the
U.S. in forcing the Legal Committee of the U.N. to adopt an antiterrorist pact
with muscle as a means of further restraining the operations of the Palestinian
guerrillas?

This alleged introduction of bombs into the U.S., following in the wake of
the Munich Olympics incident, played a major role in moving federal authorities
to initiate a "dragnet" investigation and interrogation and surveillance of Arab
residents and students in the country. Cracking down on Arabs and restrictive
measures against all travelers passing through the U.S. was the inevitable
result.

On October 26, on page 2 in a five-column headline, the readers of the New
York Times were told: "Israel Intercepts Letter Bombs Mailed to Nixon, Rogers
and Laird." The story pointed out that the latest letter bombs were "similar to
those mailed to Jews in various countries from Amsterdam last month by the Arab
guerrilla organization known as the 'Black September.' One letter bomb killed an
official in the Israeli Embassy in London."

Two days later a UPI story, carried on certain radio stations, revealed that
an American tourist, twenty-two-year-old Dennis Feinstein from Stockton,
California, had been arrested by the Israeli police as he attempted to cross
over into Lebanon. He was being held on suspicion of mailing letter bombs to top
American officials. The story appeared in some papers, including the Washington
Post.

The Times News Summary and Index of the city edition on October 28 listed for
page 3 under "International": "Israel holds American in mailing of letter
bombs." But not one line of the story appeared in that edition. In the later
edition the listing was deleted from the Index. In page 3 of the earlier edition
there had been an unclear, meaningless photo of "men with opposing views
scuffling on a Santiago, Chile, street," which appeared to have been dropped in
as a last-minute filler replacement in a spot where the Israeli story might have
initially been intended to go. New copy replaced this photograph on page 3 in
the later edition.

It took the Sunday Times of December 24, 1972 in a lengthy article, "How
Israelis Started the Terror by Post," to place the responsibility for the spate
of bombs. As noted by other European observers, it was out of character for the
Black September not to have claimed "credit" for these incidents, as they had
done instantaneously at the time of Munich and invariably on other occasions.

With the exception of the first London bomb, which just missed detection, the
bomb in the Bronx post office, and the one mailed from India, which injured
jeweler Vivian Prins in London, all the other numerous letter bombs sent in
Europe and the U.S. to Jews and Jewish organizations were somehow intercepted or
proved to be duds. In contrast, almost all of the bombs addressed to Arabs and
Palestinians worked successfully. The device for these bombs is very simple, and
they have been generally termed to be uniformly deadly. In the words of the
police in New York regarding the Hadassah letters: "They failed to detonate even
though the trigger was lying directly against the blasting cap." And the
Palestinians proved on many occasions their ability to handle infinitely more
sophisticated weapons than these.

While the invention of the letter bomb went back to a brilliant but
unbalanced Swedish chemist, Martin Eckenberg, who killed himself at the age of
forty-one in a London prison in 1910, Zionist terrorists, the Stern Gang and the
Irgun, had brought the weapon to the Middle East. In 1947 letter-bomb campaigns
were directed against prominent British politicians believed to be unsympathetic
to the Zionist goal of establishing a state in Palestine, and figured in the
internationally publicized incident in which the brother of a British officer,
Roy Farran, who had been acquitted of murdering a Jewish youth in Palestine, was
killed by a parcel bomb admittedly sent by the Stern Gang.

The Zionist apparatus literally exploded when a Times front-page story
headlined an excerpt from Margaret Truman's book alleging a 1947 letter-bomb
attempt by the Stern Gang on the life of her father. [370][371] The Anglo-Jewish
press across the country reverberated with criticism, one newspaper going so far
as to make the familiar charge of "anti-Semitism." In a New York Times Letter to
the Editor, Benjamin Gepner, who identified himself as the U.S.-Western
Hemisphere leader of the "Stern Group," insisted that it was absurd even to
think that there could have been such a plot against the President. The
letter-bomb attempt apparently had taken place at a time when the Chief
Executive was urging Zionists to be more restrained in their demands and to
become more sensitive to the Palestinian plight. Aside from the fact that the
authoress had little reason to pull this assassination attempt out of the air,
the Stern Gang's own long record of terror supported the plausibility of the
story.

Explosive devices were widely used by the Israelis in a broad campaign
directed against German scientists working in Egypt in 1962 and 1963. A bomb
placed in a gift parcel exploded, killing scientist Michael Khouri and five
others with him, and an attempt was made on the life of Dr. Hans Kleinwachter,
another scientist. Another package addressed to a West German scientist working
in Cairo blew up when opened, blinding his German secretary. The daughter of
German scientist Dr. Paul Goerke was threatened with a similar fate.

The Israelis succeeded in their reign of terror. Almost to a man, the West
German scientists working on the development of rockets for President Nasser's
army quit their Egyptian positions and returned home. This is recounted in
detail in The Champagne Spy,28 authored by
Israeli spy Wolfgang Lotz, who boasted of having sent messages out of Cairo on
the wireless hidden in his bathroom scales to his chief, saying that he was
"sure we can induce additional German scientists to leave by dispatching more
threatening letters and seeing that they are published in the German press."
After a public reprimand by Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, Israeli Security Chief
Iser Halprin resigned in an admission of Israeli complicity in the campaign
against the Germans.

There were still other bomb varieties in which the Israelis excelled. Prior
to the June 1967 war, the Chief Intelligence Officer in the Gaza Strip and' the
Egyptian Military Attache' in Jordan were both killed by book bombs. In the wake
of the 1972 Lydda Airport massacre, the Palestine Popular Front's spokesman,
Ghassan Kanafani, was blown up when a plastic bomb attached to the exhaust of
his car exploded. And a series of booby-trapped letters, sent that fall, killed
or badly injured a dozen senior Arab guerrillas and prominent Palestinians in
Beirut.

Following the Kanafani death, Ma'ariv the Israeli daily, wrote: "The
terrorists' statement linked the death of Kanafani to Israel and accused her of
mounting this operation. Israel does not deny this or confirm it." Some eleven
days following this incident, Anis Sayegh, a Director of the Palestinian
Research Institute in Beirut, received an envelope ostensibly addressed to him
from the Islamic Higher Council. When he opened it, it exploded, causing him
partial blindness and the loss of three fingers. Within the same time period,
another mail parcel exploded in the hands of the Director of a Beirut bank and
the security officers of the Fateh in Beirut. (One had to closely scan the small
print and the back pages of the Times to find a line or two, if that, about
these incidents.)

In putting together all the pertinent bits of this tragic history, this
observation is very much in order: The terrorists of yesterday have since become
Prime Ministers, Foreign Ministers, Generals, and other VIPs of the Israeli
state of today, and the armies that brought Israel its "liberation" and widely
employed terror-the Haganah, Irgun, and the Stern Gang-have become the
victorious armies of Israel today. While letter bombs and other forms of
terrorism have been used by both sides, it was the Israelis who introduced them
into the Middle East and made, as usual, the perfect propaganda use of the
deadly explosives. For it was the exploitation of terror, above all, that
continued to provide the public excuse for the adamant Israeli refusal to
recognize the PLO, which for so long was supported by the Nixon, Ford, and
Carter administrations and greatly complicated the task of reaching a Middle
East settlement.

No single act so totally equated the Palestinians with terror than the
killing of the Israeli athletes at the Olympic games in Munich. In the early
morning of September 5, 1972, eight Palestinian guerrillas (newspapers more
often referred to them as "Arabs" because that word evoked stronger sparks of
hatred) invaded Olympic Village in Munich by climbing over a fence and forcing
their way into the dormitories of the Israeli team, where they killed two
athletes and took nine others as hostages. The guerrillas demanded the release
of two hundred of their compatriots held in Israeli jails and an airplane to
take them to an unspecified Arab capital. Israel, consistent with her
longstanding policy, refused to negotiate with the Palestinians, but high German
authorities attempted to do so, offering to pay unlimited ransom and even to
substitute four of themselves for the hostages.

After lengthy parleying and three extensions of the original noon deadline,
the Arab guerrillas and their Israeli hostages were flown fifteen miles by
helicopters from Olympic Village to the NATO Fuerstenfeldbruck Airport, [371]
[372] where they had been told they could board a Lufthansa jet for an Arab
airport. Five German sharpshooters backed up by police waited to confront the
eight Palestinians. Two guerrillas left the helicopter to inspect the Boeing 727
on which they planned to head for Tunisia. The Germans opened fire. One of the
three helicopters was set afire by an exploding grenade thrown by one of the
Palestinians as he jumped from the helicopter. But a German government spokesman
reported that the hostages were all safe. Three hours later the Olympics
Committee announced that all the hostages had been killed.

In the course of the official government inquiry into the airport shootout,
Police Chief Manfred Schreiber admitted he had lost control of the situation
during the shooting.29 The original police
announcement claimed that the guerrillas had fired first, but most eyewitnesses
agreed that the sharpshooters had opened fire. Under dispute, until today, was
how the Israeli hostages died: Was it when the Arabs blew up the helicopter, or
had they already been killed by Arab machine-gun fire? It also was not beyond
the realm of possibility that some had died at the hands of German bullets
intended for the guerrillas.

It has never been established that the airport battle was necessary. All
discussion of this very moot point was summarily dismissed by Police Chief
Schreiber-and by the U.S. media-with the unsubstantiated allegation that the
Arabs would have murdered the hostages en route had they been allowed to leave
the airport. This presumption was in no way supported by the meticulous care and
consideration shown their hostages by the Palestinian hijackers of the U.S. and
European planes in the September 1970 incident in Jordan (or by the treatment
accorded in other later hijackings up through Entebbe in the summer of 1976).

Five and a half months later, on February 21, 1973, a Libyan Boeing 727 with
113 civilians aboard was callously clawed out of the sky by Israeli fighter
planes over Israeli-occupied Egyptian territory of the Sinai, about twelve miles
from the Suez Canal. Some 102 passengers and 8 crewmen were killed immediately
or later died, including 27 women and children. The plane had overflown Cairo,
losing its way in a terrible sandstorm, when it was intercepted by Israeli
fighters, whom the French pilot mistook for a friendly escort of Egyptian MIGs.
The aircraft had already turned around and was headed toward Cairo, nine minutes
away, when it was shot down.

The Israeli version, supported by Moshe Dayan press conferences, insisted
that the plane had penetrated "probably the most [373] sensitive area held by
Israel," that warnings had been given, that instructions to land had been
ignored by the pilot, and that the 727 was not shot down but crashed after
landing. The Defense Minister contended that the Israeli fighter pilots had
signaled the Libyan plane pilot for fifteen minutes (in that time the plane
would have been past Israel and well over the Mediterranean). And from the
outset this Israeli fairy tale was accepted - even embroidered upon - by the
American press, radio, and television.

If the media had indulged a bit more in research and study and less in
generating hysteria and hatred, they would have discovered a perfect precedence
in Israel's 1955 stand when an El Al plane, which had strayed into Bulgarian
airspace, was shot down and fifty-eight lives were lost. In a lawsuit brought in
the International Court of Justice at Geneva, Israel successfully argued:

It is the duty of any person who seeks to interfere with the normal flying
of civilian aircraft by ordering it to land at a designated airport not to
deliberately and unreasonably increase the inherent risks and certainly not
to provoke completely new and unwarranted hazards inevitable when modern
armaments were intentionally brought into play. The Bulgarian admission
shows that these safeguards were not discharged. The heart of the present
case is that fire was opened on the 4XAK which in the space of a few minutes
was callously clawed out of the sky and destroyed. The Israeli government
contended that no rule of law, not the liberal interpretations of any
provision of the Chicago convention governing international aircraft, nor
the rules of general international law, would permit such a degree of
violence.

The generally accepted practice is to try to "box" the plane in and lead it
in the correct direction. And the Libyan Boeing was already moving out of the
danger zone when it was blown to smithereens.

The language used in page-one headlines of the New York Times the day after
the incident carefully concealed what had taken place: "Israelis Down a Libyan
Air Liner in the Sinai, Killing at Least 74 - Say it Ignored Warnings to Land...
Jet Crash-Lands." The Times, the Post, and other big-city presses avoided the
use of the words "shot down," trying to give an impression that the jet crashed
on its own after warnings to land.

The media's obvious aim was to exculpate Israel of any possible guilt and
place the guilt on the French pilot, who had been on loan to Libyan Airways, for
his refusal to listen to the warnings. Varied types of the art of slanting went
into the reportage to the American people. There was, for example, slanting by
placement-whatever the Arabs [374] [375] said, including Cairo and Libya, was
relegated to unimportant positions; whatever Israel said went into headlines. In
other previous air tragedies the papers invariably showed pictures of pretty
stewardesses; There were no pictures of the Libyan airline stewardesses in this
instance. In fact, there was no picture at all of survivors, which might have
evoked some sympathy for the Arab victims. All one saw or read was condonation
and excuse of the Israelis.

At the time of the Munich killing of Israeli athletes, banner headlines
carried "the expression of horror by leaders around the world." Bold headlines
ran: Head of UN Condemns Raid as Dastardly." But Secretary-General Kurt
Waldheim's statement that he "deplored" the fact that a civilian plane had been
shot down, and his expression of shock, concern, and condolences on the shooting
down of the Libyan airliner, were reported only in the early editions of the New
York Post and buried away, the seven-line account obscured under a tiny head:
"Waldheim [his name without his title is not familiar] Expresses Shock."30
The quoted Israeli fear that "the Israelis could not guarantee that it was not a
kamikaze plane loaded with explosives headed for an Israeli city" was featured
prominently and made to sound plausible. And the only mention of the terrible
blinding sandstorm, which caused the Libyan plane to lose its way, was as an
incidental reference to the more than two-hour delay to Israeli helicopters
taking off with wounded survivors.

The front page of the Daily News in New York
31 carried this bold headline: "Israelis Down Arab Jet." The readers had
to turn to page 2 to discover that it had been a civilian airliner. The New York
Post headlines were also of interest. The first was: "Israel Forces Down Libya
Jet-70 Die." A little later in the day: "Israel Downs [never "shoots"] Libya
Airliner; 70 Killed." And then in the continuation off this first page, they
reverted to the original headline of the earlier edition: "Israel Forces Down a
Libyan Jet; 70 Die."

Where the Times' story on the Israeli emergency Cabinet meeting featured the
Israeli claim that the pilot had acknowledged the warnings and interception
signals, the New York Post even went further into the realm of the fanciful,
quoting an Israeli newspaper account that the pilot had radioed his pursuers:
"We cannot obey your orders because of the political situation. This area does
not belong to you." While this yarn was being spread through the combined wire
services across the country, the correspondent of Israeli journal Ha'aretz was
spreading other propaganda on a two-hour talk show over New York radio station
WMCA. Under the usual "fair" media arrangements, the former [375] President of
the Zionist Organization of America, another articulate Israelist, and this
Israeli writer were pitted against the editor of Middle East Perspective. The
"moderator" of this program three days later was among the six commentators of
the same station who interviewed prominent guests from Israel, representatives
of Israeli-oriented national and international organizations, and their American
counterparts in a continuous twenty-five-hour broadcast tribute to Israel's
first quarter century.

The Times which scarcely waits minutes to execute moral judgment editorially,
remained silent the day after the plane shooting, although the tragedy had been
known in the U.S. before noon the day before. On the third day the editorial
page spoke out under the title: "Tragic Blunder." Its words, "horrifying
blunder" and "act of callousness," like slapping a child on the wrist for eating
too much candy, could be contrasted to those used in its editorial six months
earlier on the Olympics tragedy, "Murder in Munich": "Arab fanatics... homicidal
hatred... indiscriminate murder... innocent lives snuffed out."32
The editorial reluctantly conceded that the tape of the pilot's exchange with
the Cairo control tower "lent credence, though not conclusive evidence" that the
pilot had no idea that he would be subject to an air attack if he did not land.
The publication's principal concern appeared to be the effect the incident would
have on Israel's image and its case before the U.S. public.33

The murder in Khartoum on March 2, 1973, by the Black September movement of
one Belgian and two American diplomats was as sickening an act as the shooting
down of the Libyan plane and in no way condonable. As the author of The Game of
Nations, 34 Miles Copeland, noted in
National Review, "The Palestinian movement is a breeding ground, as is any
homeless, idle and hungry population, for what we might call 'unstructured
rebellion'-that is, rebellion against things in general, toward no clear goal."35

Whereas the Times waited three days to publish its editorial on the Libyan
incident, less that six hours after the Khartoum deaths had been announced, the
editorial page was attacking the act as "lunacy at large."36
Bias was shown not only in the speed with which the paper reacted but in the
words of its editorial: "The Palestinian extremists made their move just as Arab
propaganda machinery was spinning forth outrage against Israel for the shooting
down of an unarmed Libyan airliner . . . Such talk now is even less appropriate
than ever " (Italics added.)

Where the plane had been obviously shot down on what was still [376] [377]
Egyptian territory but occupied by Israel, not a single news program on the
three major television networks mentioned this fact. CBS' Walter Cronkite
declared the plane had been shot down over Israeli territory.
37

After the Israeli government reluctantly admitted that the crucial black box,
recording communications between the Libyan plane and the ground control tower
and conversations among those in the pilot's cockpit, had revealed that the
French pilot had actually thought he was surrounded by friendly Egyptian MIGs
showing him the way home, the New York Times continued to cover up Israeli
guilt. The front page of February 24 contained two six-column photos, one
captioned "Five Israeli military chaplains read psalms as the coffins [crude,
unpainted fruit crates with crooked nails protruding and shrouds showing] of
victims of the downed plane are placed on a boat." The other, "A military
cortege on the Egyptian side of the Suez Canal waiting for the first boat." The
glowing headline, "100 Bodies of Jet Victims Taken Over Suez to Egypt," the
reportage, and the publication of the Dayan offer of partial compensation
endowed the Israelis with great acts of magnanimity.

The sole headlined reference to the important revelations of the flight
recorder was ambiguously set forth in this manner: 'Israel Confirms Cairo Data."
This admission only followed the substantiation by U.S. intelligence sources,
which had also monitored the conversation. One had to read well into the article
to discover that the important black box had confirmed the control tower tape,
played at the press conference two days earlier, the authenticity of which the
Times had then questioned.

In his endeavor to exculpate the Israelis from the guilt the International
Civil Aviation Organization had voted 105 to 1 to fasten upon them, the Times'
Robert Lindsey, in a June 7 article headlined: "Sinai Crash Study Notes
Confusion," unwittingly blew up another Israeli myth widely circulated at the
time of the tragedy by his paper: that the curtains of the windows of the Boeing
had been closed and therefore the Israelis could not see that the plane carried
passengers.

As on so many other occasions, the Times proved to be more Israelist than the
two leading Israeli papers, Ma'ariv and Ha'aretz. One Israeli columnist noted
that the downing of the plane had been kept secret for three or four hours
before publication of any announcement, which in itself created at the outset a
number of question marks. It was the first time in the history of civil aviation
that a plane had crashed in an area easily reachable and yet, for twenty-four
hours, it was impossible to get a picture of the wreckage. Requests to visit the
site were rejected without explanation. Emergency arrangements for the press
were refused. Nor was the spokesman for the Israeli defense forces available for
any queries or questions until twenty-four hours later, when reporters had a
right "to ask themselves what had taken place and what had been erased in the
interim."

Further, according to Israeli accounts, it was only three days after the
incident that General David Elazar, the Chief of Staff, spoke to the public. He
had, according to the official version, received the report on the Libyan plane
"after some minutes of contacts between the planes-apparently between 14:03 and
14:05, and the contact was finished at 14:11 when the flaming Libyan plane
touched the ground." Actually, as revealed by the all-important little black
box, the contact ended at 14:09 when the bullets were fired at the wings of the
Boeing to force it to land. Therefore the contact had not lasted more than from
four to six minutes. As one Israeli newspaper saw it, "the reception of the
information from the air force commander and his pondering, as well as the
decision, were all executed within a single three minute connection. Why, they
ask, was not more time given for the decision? Why did the Chief of Staff hear,
think, and decide almost simultaneously?"

Perhaps the excuse made by the Israeli fighter pilot at a press conference
sheds some light. "When I hit him, he was at a minute's flight distance from the
canal." This fear that the plane might have crossed back safely into Egypt was
in line with the Chief of Staff's remarks that he had "to decide immediately."
If the latter had waited to contact Defense Minister Dayan, the Libyan plane
could have slipped away, which apparently would have been contrary to his
instructions.

Air Force Commander Mordechai Hod, who had directed the June 1967 air strikes
against Arab airfields, claimed that the Libyan pilot could see the airport but
had disregarded all signals. Hod ascribed certain words to the pilot that were
totally disproved, again by the black box. There was no basis, according to the
Israeli press accounts, for the Chief of Staff's statement that the Boeing pilot
saw and understood the signals made by the Israeli Phantom pilots, disregarded
and stubbornly refused to follow them. The pilot's words of confusion, as
recorded, directly contradicted such a version.

The first signal to land was given by the Israeli Phantom jets two minutes
after the Libyan plane was identified. The first warning shots came a minute and
a half later. In this briefest interim, Hod came to [378] [379] the conclusion
that "there is no doubt that the Boeing crew understood what we were asking from
them and that the crew saw the airport and refused to land there." But again
according to irrefutable evidence, the Libyan crew did not see any airport. The
first warning shots were fired at a time when the plane was moving away from the
airport in a westerly direction toward the Suez Canal and Egypt. And Hod talked
to his Chief of Staff after the plane had turned away from the Bir Gafgafa
Airport, where the Israelis wished it to land, and perhaps even before the first
warning shots were fired.

It was established that the Chief of Staff had acted only after it was clear
that the Boeing had not-and could not cause any harm in its mistaken course into
Sinai. Fears that the plane had aggressive intentions were groundless.
Aggressive intentions are carried out while moving toward a target and certainly
not while going away, back to one's home base. Yet the Times continued to allude
to this repudiated contention that the destructive design of the Libyan plane
was a genuine possibility. Because of the impossible weather conditions, Israeli
suspicion that the enemy might be taking air photos was likewise totally
unjustified.

While a Daily News editorial called the incident "a wantonly brutal downing,
which shocked and horrified Israel's warmest friends,"38
in the four days following the wanton attack on the Libyan plane, not a single
columnist in any of the New York papers carried a single reference to the
incident. Moralists such as Peter Hamill, who spouted every time someone was
killed in Vietnam or Israel, were glued to their chairs in total silence. Where
Tom Wicker had written about the seeds of terrorism on the previous September 7,
nothing now came from his fertile pen on Israeli brigandage.

This U.S. reaction was in marked contrast to the hysteria that raged for ten
days after the Israeli athletes had been killed-the endless, overwhelming,
nationwide media reportage detailing the mourning, tributes to the dead, and
vituperative censure of the Arabs.39

The media's gross romanticization of the Munich tragedy was exposed in a
column by Shirley Povich in the Washington Post "It is time to deflate that guff
about the great brotherhood the Olympics promote. They are torn by constant
bickering among team officials of all the nations, and political alignments
influence the judging in events like boxing, diving and gymnastics." In contrast
to the sensationalism in U.S. newspapers that ran photos showing mourning
athlete Jesse Owens, handkerchief in hand, and grieving Israeli teammates of the
deceased,40 the Washington writer noted:

Olympic Village was a shame to behold on Tuesday afternoon, after the first
shock at the news that two Israelis were dead and nine held hostage by Arab
raiders. A few hours after the initial excitement subsided, you couldn't
find an empty ping pong table in the village, rock music was blaring as
usual, and it was just another day in Olympic Village. There was other
evidence of boredom all around, even with their Israeli comrades having all
that trouble in Building 33. 41

The funeral services both in Israel and in the U.S. for the one athlete who
had been born American, but at the time of his death held Israeli citizenship,
received the widest coverage. An Associated Press story out of Cleveland, Ohio,
indicated that Governor John J. Gilligan, at that time a presidential hopeful,
had ordered state flags to be lowered to half-mast in memory of this weight
lifter who was one of the nine Israeli hostages "killed by Arab commandos" (two
athletes died in the original attack at Olympic Village). The bereavement of the
parents of David Berger overflowed onto every television set in the U.S.
42

The Times' recital of the return of the bodies of the Arab victims of the
Libyan plane incident to Cairo noted that six bodies, which were neither
Egyptian nor Libyan, had been sent to the governments concerned: five to France
and one to the U.S. This, three days after the incident, was the first reference
whatsoever to the fact that an American had been among the victims. Only on the
last six lines on page 8 of the New York Times 43
did the name of the American appear - Wladyslaw Boysoglebski, sixty-two years
old, of Chicago, an American who had taken out citizenship after immigrating
from Poland. No flags were ordered to be set at half-mast by Illinois Governor
Richard B. Ogilvie when the body of this American was returned, in contrast to
the honor accorded in Ohio to a half-American, half-Israeli serving on the
Olympic team of a foreign country. A call to the cable desk of UPI to find out
whether they knew anything about the disposition of the body that was being
shipped via Tel Aviv embassy to the States yielded a total blank.

While the responsibility or necessity for the German attack killing the
Munich hostages was never established, at no point did the media ever call
attention to this doubt. However, in the reportage of the Libyan plane incident,
every sort of innuendo, excuse, or explanation was indulged in, either by the
media on its own or by publicizing the views of the Israeli pilots, the Israeli
army, and the Israeli government. Where the Munich story had received banner
headlines right across the front page and was continued with large five-column
Times [380] [381] headlines on the second day, the 110 innocent victims of
trigger~happy Israeli pilots received, on the first day, three columns, and the
third line of the heading gave the Israeli point of view, and that was that.

More than four years later, the Zionists were continuing to exploit the 1972
Olympics affair. ABC national television provided unpaid prime time (December
1976) at a cost of close to $2 million for a specially produced Sunday evening
television film, Twenty-One Hours at Munich, under the meticulous direction of
coproducers Edward Feldman and Robert Greenwald (illustrating once more the
Zionist connection). The greatest liberties were taken with the facts to portray
the Palestinians as the blackest villains, even attributing sorrowful last words
to one Israeli athlete, who had died all alone. The ABC press releases, replete
with pejorative adjectives, further spawned anti-Arab hatred.

Everywhere this double standard prevailed 44
with but a few dissenting voices. Robert Pierpoint, CBS White House
correspondent, was one of a handful to point out that the U.S. had lost its
sense of fair play. He noted that in February 1973, when the Israelis carried
out a commando raid deep in the heart of Lebanon, striking at Palestinian
refugee camps 130 miles from their own territory with planes and tanks and
wiping out thirty-seven lives in the process, "there was next to no outcry in
this country." It was on this occasion that an entire Lebanese family of six was
crushed to death as they sat in their car, by an Israeli tank. Many other
innocents were killed in this same raid, along with a few Palestinian
guerrillas, allegedly part of the Black September movement.

Pierpoint on this CBS telecast declared that the shooting down of the Libyan
airliner had drawn some official regrets, but not expressed publicly nor at the
level of the White House. He continued:

Nor did any U.S. official ever indicate that the U.S might think twice
before It dispatched more American-built Phantom jets to Israel of the type
that had shot down the Libyan airliner. Indeed, the very next week,
President Nixon let it be known after his talk in the Oval Office with
Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir that more such Phantoms would soon be on
their way. Contrast these events with what happened after the Arab Black
September's massacre of Israeli athletes at Munich. The U.S., from President
Nixon on down, expressed outrage, and the President ordered steps taken to
see that no such terrorism could strike at Israelis in this country.
Senator Hugh Scott, after meeting with President Nixon to discuss domestic
problems, standing at a White House podium, in response to a question on
what should be done to the Arabs who had participated in the murders in
Khartoum, responded, "I hope they shoot them all, and the sooner the
better." No mention was made of a trial, or the possibility that if a fair
trial were held, it might turn out that not all the terrorists were guilty
of the murders.
For so long Americans have become used to thinking of the Israelis as the
good guys and the Arabs as the bad guys that many react emotionally along
the lines of previous prejudices. The fact is that both sides have committed
unforgivable acts of terror, both sides have killed innocents, both sides
have legitimate grievances and illegitimate methods of expressing them.
Perhaps the Arabs' action was more irrational-sheer terror. At least it was
not backed by a relatively rational government which justifies its actions
as necessary. The Israelis have and utilize a formidable political
propaganda force in this country in the form of six million Jews. The Arabs
have only slightly less than a million descendants in America just beginning
to organize a nationwide counterforce. Perhaps this will help bring balance.
In the meantime, the rest of us might apply more steady balance and fair
play to the difficult problems of the Middle East " [Italics added.)

The broadcast was no sooner on the airwaves and reprinted in the Christian
Science Monitor 45 than the usual hue and
cry was raised. Pierpoint was, of course, charged with anti-Semitism, and his
head was demanded. Telegrams and letters poured into the network. The CBS
President and Vice President in charge of news were importuned to exercise some
control over Pierpoint's judgment. The CBS correspondent had this to say about
the smears and fears that were raised: "As you can imagine, some of the
criticism was highly emotional if not downright hysterical. I was not surprised
at this since the subject is a highly emotional one. I was mildly surprised at
the manner in which the critics are so well organized that within hours people
who had not heard the broadcast were protesting by phone or writing letters. In
any case, the opposition to this kind of broadcast was and is formidable."46

The treatment of the Ma'alot affair soon thereafter clearly indicated that
the Pierpoint call for press fair play had fallen on deaf ears. On May 15, 1974,
three fedayeen from the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine
(PDFLP) stole across the Lebanese-Israel border (an Israeli nurse testified that
one had been living nearby in Safad for a long time) and at six in the morning
seized a Ma'alot school in which ninety teenage members of the semimilitary
Nahal 47 had been spending the night after some training.

Fifteen youngsters escaped through an open door at the time of the takeover,
and two were allowed to leave because they were ill. The guerrillas sent two
more youths out with a list of twenty-six prisoners held in Israeli jails whose
release they demanded in exchange for the [382] [383] hostages. They asked that
the French and Rumanian Ambassadors serve as mediators.

The prisoners-twenty-three Palestinians, two Israelis, and one Japanese-were
to be flown to Damascus, according to the guerrilla demand. As soon as the
arrival of the released prisoners had been confirmed in the Syrian capital, the
mediating Ambassadors would receive through Paris and Bucharest a code word with
which to identify themselves before starting negotiations for the release of the
hostages. But if no code word was received by 6:00 F.M., the guerrillas "would
not be responsible for the consequences,' they warned.

While negotiations were being carried on between the Palestinians, Israelis,
Cairo (from where the plane to carry out the Palestinian prisoners was to come),
and the Ambassadors, Israeli military forces attacked the school half an hour
before the guerrilla deadline. In the ensuing battle the fedayeen were wiped
out, but sixteen children were killed, victims of either exploding Palestinian
grenades or Israeli bullets. And the Zionist-media alliance both in the U.S. and
Britain (where I happened to be at the moment) went absolutely wild, even as the
facts surrounding the tragedy's final moments became increasingly beclouded.
While nothing could ever condone the brutal killing of innocent children, much
evidence was adduced that the Israeli government had far from done everything in
its power to avoid the tragic loss of life and that the military had
overreacted. And it was the French Ambassador to Israel who cast the principal
doubts on the oversimplified story disseminated by the Western press.

Ambassador Jean Herly was waiting at the French Consulate in Haifa throughout
the afternoon for the Israeli authorities to call him to Ma'alot. At 2:00 he had
been informed by the Israelis that he was not to receive the code word
permitting him to negotiate with the fedayeen until the prisoners held by Israel
had been freed and had reached Damascus. At 3:22, according to Israeli Foreign
Ministry documents, the Ambassador had requested permission to proceed to
Ma'alot. The answer was delayed. Realizing at 4:45 that it was now impossible to
organize the release of the Palestinian prisoners and get them to Damascus in
time for the 6:00 deadline, the Ambassador had himself flown by helicopter to
Ma'alot to plead with the Palestinians to extend their ultimatum.

Upon his arrival, a high-ranking Israeli officer asked the French Ambassador
if he had the code word. He replied in the negative, and then, as he told Agence
France Presse, asked to meet the Minister of Defense or the Chief of Staff,
"thinking that I could perhaps, even without the code word and through my
diplomatic pass, get into contact with the fedayeen and try at least to postpone
the expiration of the ultimatum." But he was informed it was "too dangerous." A
few minutes later, at 5:30, in the words of the Ambassador to the press, he
heard shots and explosions. "I was told that it was all over and asked to return
to Tel Aviv." Acting on the direct orders of the Chief of Staff, forty minutes
before the ultimatum's expiration at 5:20 P.M., the Israeli military forces
stormed the building.

Herly, a diplomat to the end, stated that he was certain that the authorities
"had not willfully sought to prevent him from speaking to the terrorists, but I
still ask myself and wonder: What could have been done that wasn't done between
five o'clock and six o'clock?" He had been denied permission to talk to the
Palestinians on the grounds that he had not received the code word from
Palestinian headquarters in Damascus. But as the Ambassador later told the
Jerusalem Post, there must have been a "grave misunderstanding" because he was,
in fact, not supposed to receive the code word until the released prisoners had
arrived safely in Damascus. Israeli Information Minister Shimon Peres insisted
that Herly never could have talked to the Palestinians without having the code
word in his possession.

According to Ha'aretz of May 17, the government had decided early in the
morning to reject the clearly understood Palestinian conditions. But to buy
time, Moshe Dayan and General Mordechai Gur informed the fedayeen that they
agreed to their terms, meanwhile formulating plans for the military rescue of
the hostages. Fully aware of the overwhelming sympathy of the Western press,
both the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defense saw an opportunity to take a
chance, even at the expense of children's lives, of making important favorable
international propaganda at a time when Israel's public relations standing in
the world had gravely plummeted. The die was cast, and French mediation efforts
were not permitted to upset the carefully calculated Israeli planning.

As at Munich, the Israelis justified the decision to storm the school on the
conviction that the Palestinians intended, in any event, to kill their young
hostages when their demands were rejected and the ultimatum ran out. Again,
guerrilla action did not sustain this thesis. As PDFLP spokesman Yasser Abed
Rubbuh later declared, the three terrorists had orders to prolong the original
deadline by two hours in the event no agreement was reached. The Palestinians
maintained that at no time did they plan to harm the hostages if their demands
were met. Their plan had been to bargain the first half of the hostages for the
[384] release of the prisoners on their list, and then the second half for the
safe passage of the three Palestinians out of Israel.

It was the Palestinian contention that the political decision to storm the
school "whatever the consequences" had been made long before the 1600 GMT
deadline was reached. According to the PDFLP version, "the Rumanian and French
Ambassadors were (old by the Israelis they do not have any aircraft available to
take the prisoners to Damascus." But the Rumanian government had been notified
at 1530 GMT, half an hour before the deadline and the exact time the Israelis
stormed the school, that the prisoners had actually taken off for Cyprus.

The Popular Front openly admitted responsibility for Ma'alot, but at the same
time, in a statement appearing in the London Times,48
PDFLP leader Nayef Hawatmeh challenged Israel to submit to a public postmortem
to determine who, in fact, had been responsible for the bloodshed. This the
Israeli government ignored, and the media declined to follow up the matter.

Had there been a careful investigation, it would have been revealed that the
border settlement of Ma'alot had been carefully chosen by Hawatmeh for this raid
on the twenty-sixth anniversary of the establishment of the Israeli state. This
village, once the Arab village of Tarchiha, as part of western Galilee, was to
have been included under the 1948 U.N. partition plan in the Arab state, but was
attacked and occupied before May 15, then annexed by the Israeli state. The Arab
villagers fled during the fighting, and after the 1949 armistice their return
was barred. The village was razed to the ground, and on its ruins the Israeli
village of Ma'alot had been built.

The U.S. media was totally uninterested in any exposition of Palestinian
thinking. By the sheerest of coincidences, in the late evening of May 14 as the
attack on Ma'alot was taking place, I was in Beirut taping a conversation with
Palestinian Abu Nidal (a pseudonym), leader of a group that had split off from
the PDFLP and is Iraq oriented. This twenty-five-year-old Palestinian expressed
himself frankly and violently:

We believe that Palestine is ours, and the only way to get back what is ours
is to fight.... I am not Mr. Sadat. I am a Palestinian, and I am not
concerned with world opinion, including American, which has done nothing for
our very fair cause through more than twenty-six years. The world can
respect you only when you are strong enough to stand in the face of the
world and fight for your cause.. .. We showed we were serious in our attack
on Qiryat Shemona, and we will strike again. [385]

His reference was to the Palestinian attack six weeks earlier on an Israeli
border village in which eighteen Israelis had been killed and sixteen injured,
but three of his companions had lost their lives, the oldest of whom was just
twenty years old.

The following day when I reached London, this pertinent tape was used on BBC
television and radio. But on arrival in New York, forty eight hours after
Ma'alot, there was the accustomed total blackout from television-radio news and
talk shows. No one dared put into question the Israeli-Zionist propaganda that
the sole Palestinian aim was to murder the innocent and spread terror without
cause.

At Ma'alot little children had been involved, and hysteria ruled the American
Jewish community. Brooklyn District Attorney Eugene Gold and companions chained
themselves to a fence in front of the U.N. in protest. New York's Mayor Beame
addressed a large emotional rally, urging the U.N. to adopt immediate sanctions
against Arab countries to avert further acts of terrorism. New York Post
columnists Max Lerner and Peter Hamill far outstripped in narrow, vindictive
one-sidedness the efforts of other media pundits. Hamill screamed:

And now they were killing children, Israeli children.... People were dying
in the deserts of the Middle East. Israel, which initially had allied itself
with the U.S. on a moral basis, had discovered that it was just another
colony, its fate in the hands of Henry Kissinger whose wife kept Arab swag
in a wall safe in her bedroom.49

In Jerusalem Premier Golda Meir claimed her government had been prepared to
submit to the commandos' demands to free the prisoners, but that they had not
had enough time to act. In an angry television address she vowed that Israel
"will do everything in its power to chop off the hands that intend to harm a
child or an adult in any city or village." The Meir caretaker government, which
was soon replaced by the Yitzhak Rabin Cabinet, came under increasingly angry
attack from many quarters for its handling of the affair, as more and more of
the facts began to leak out.

One of the freed Ma'alot students, sixteen-year-old Rachel Lagziel, told
reporters that the captives were allowed to listen to their transistors and to
hear all the news broadcast in Hebrew. "We were allowed to drink our water and
eat our provisions," eighteen-year-old Tamara Ben-Hamu later said. "Don't be
afraid" one commando said. "If Israel gives us the prisoners, you will not be
harmed." (This, of course, never appeared in the U.S. press~only in Israel.)

Angry Israelis assailed Dayan. "You have made us the [386] [387] stepchildren
of Israel," Ma'alot Council Chairman Eli Ben Yaacov screamed at him. "It's
because most of us are from Morocco," he added.

Before a day after the incident had passed, the Israelis had struck back
against South Lebanon in a retaliatory raid. Air attacks against civilian
targets brought death to fifty~two in an. impoverished refugee camp and in
Lebanese villages. Am El Helweh and Bowry El Barajneh, refugee camps north and
south of Beirut, were the targets of the Israeli air attacks carried out by
thirty-six U.S.-supplied Phantoms. On the second successive day the "reprisal"
for Ma'alot found the Nabitieh refugee camp in South Lebanon literally razed to
the ground.

The following is from a dispatch filed by Paul Martin, which
appeared in the London Times on May 18:

Rescue workers had just dug up the bodies of the young woman and her four
small children from the rooms of their tiny house when I arrived in this
Palestinian refugee camp today. The bodies were mutilated almost beyond
recognition. Nobody knew the woman's name, but one refugee said he thought
her husband had been killed during last night's Israeli bombing raids as
well.
The house was one of about 60, lining the camp's main street, which were
flattened by three separate air strikes in two and a half hours. Half the
camp, which holds 5,000 people, had been completely destroyed by direct hits
on houses in no way connected with the Palestinian guerrillas. I counted
more than 40 craters from 1,000-lb. bombs peppering an area of less than 400
square yards.
Eight children, between the ages of 8 and 12 were killed when bombs
showered down on the camp's school. Their bodies were taken to Sidon
Hospital because their parents could not be found in the confusion. More
bodies are expected to be recovered from the debris of twisted and crumbled
buildings. The death toll so far in Nabatieh alone is 25 civilians killed
and nearly 60 wounded.
On the outskirts of the camp there was an endless string of pathetic
processions to the sedate little cemetery. There were no demonstrations of
overt grief or anger~just looks of shock and fear. Men, women and children,
who died in Israel's reprisal, were taken at short intervals to hastily
prepared graves. Their bodies were borne on open stretcher-like coffins,
draped with a flower arrangement resembling the Palestinian flag.
Nabatieh was the worst hit in Israel's wave of air strikes launched
yesterday afternoon on Palestinian refugee camps and villages at 4 P.M. as
the streets were filled with people. The bombing and strafing lasted 10
minutes. Then, as rescue workers began to drag the dead and wounded from the
debris, they struck again at 5 P.M.; the final and most devastating strike
came at 6:45 P.M.
As I arrived in Nabatieh today, the last refugees were fleeing with
mattresses and the bare essentials of survival: "This is the third time in
the past three years that we have been driven out of here by Israeli air
raids," an old villager said, "Each time we have had to build up all over
again, but we will be back, perhaps in a week, perhaps in a month; but, God
willing, we will be back."
The presence of armed guerrillas in Palestinian refugee camps is no new
phenomenon. However, at Nabatieh there clearly was no evidence in the camp
itself of any guerrilla military bases. What is obvious from this latest
Israeli blow against Lebanon is that civilians suffered the most. Little or
no damage was done to the guerrillas and, if anything, they stand to gain
much politically from what has happened.
Such events tend to create militants. At one point a group of refugees who
had lost a relative gathered around me when I was introduced as a British
correspondent, a man of about 40 snapped angrily: "Curse you and your
Balfour. Curse America. Curse you all."

A U.N. report on Nabatieh listed "60 percent destroyed, 20 percent badly
damaged, 20 percent partly destroyed. Not one house had a roof left," the
international organization noted. Yet such acts of terror against civilian
populations were relegated to inconspicuous coverage, and the pretext for the
merciless retaliation, that fedayeen were based in this area, was accepted as an
extenuating circumstance for the killings in the retaliatory onslaughts on
refugee camps.

As planes brought death to 200 innocents in these latest May raids in South
Lebanon, which had begun in 1968 and accelerated to almost daily attacks, the
same politicians, ministers, rabbis, priests, and writers who had condemned the
"cowardly methods" employed in the killings at Munich and Ma'alot found
themselves acquiescing in the more sophisticated Israeli means of terror used in
Lebanon. Exploding dolls dropped from planes "to entice" children to their
deaths brought no outraged outcries. Lebanese villages such as Rashaya Fuqhar,
once a prosperous town of 2,000 Christian Arabs and a handful of Palestinian
refugee camps in the Arkoub region of Lebanon, were subjected to attacks by
airplane, artillery, tanks, and gunboats. Israeli commandos invaded villages and
camps alike, "forcibly checking identifications, blowing up houses, killing
villagers, and taking prisoners."50 Still,
certain American newspapers called this tragedy-the forerunner to the Lebanese
civil war-a lesson that should serve as "an ultimatum to the Lebanese government
to rid themselves of the Palestinians within their midst."

It was very obvious that the "lords of the press" were not interested in
striking an equal balance by reporting these as "atrocities" as they had so
labeled Ma'alot. In the face of the Israeli aerial onslaught on innocent
Lebanese and Palestinian refugees, all that the New York [388] [389] Times would
do was to administer another mild slap to the Israel wrist and ask for "a
determined show of restraint on both sides":

The fully justified anger and determination of Israel to resist terrorist
assaults that have caused 49 deaths, mostly among children in ten weeks,
nevertheless affords no sound basis for resort to counterterror from the
air, especially when such indiscriminate tactics, also involving the death
of many innocents, have repeatedly proved ineffective. In the present
context, the Israeli response is especially unfortunate since it
directly serves the Palestinian extremists' objectives.51
[Italics added.J

The principal concern of the Times was that the Israeli savagery was
counterproductive.

Unmatched continued Israeli and U.S. Zionist-induced media hysteria over the
thirty-eight victims of the March 11, 1978, Palestinian raid served as a cover
for Begin's retaliatory blitzkrieg into southern Lebanon. First reports two days
later in the New York Post mentioned 250 deaths and 100,000 refugees.52
In Saturday's New York Times, Marvine Howe quoted "reports" of 100,000 refugees.
In fact, there were some 260,000 refugees and approximately 2000 deaths. For
noting that "apparently a dead woman in Lebanon is not worth as much as a dead
woman in Israel, "Jimmy Breslin of the New York Daily News was bitterly
assailed, and the next week an entire Sunday letters column was devoted to ten
angry writers tearing him to pieces.

Two Times editorials flayed "the senseless terror against Israel" and averred
that, "beyond messages of condolence," the world "owes Israelis sympathy and
partnership in measures to punish terrorism on every front,"53
and as late as May 7 correspondent William Farrell was writing about the
"terrorist rampage in the March carnage. James Wechsler's front and editorial
pages in the Post alternately spared no language in attacking the Palestinian
raiders, bemoaned the "lost peace," and then gloried with across-the-page
headlines: "Guerrillas Routed In All-Out Retaliation."54
As the air bombardment of fleeing innocent Lebanese and Palestinian civilians
continued, the Times referred to the "justified Lebanese retaliation."55

The Washington Post carried an AP picture of a machine-gunned car and
reported the ambushing at Aadloun by Israeli commandos of two taxi-loads of
Tibnine villagers. According to reporter Jonathan Randal, "one taxi was riddled
with machine-gun bullets, the other hit by the fin of a rocket with Hebrew
lettering on it. As many as 20 villagers-most of them women and children-were
killed. "56 Marvine Howe of the Times
simply reported that fifteen civilians had been killed and two wounded in
circumstances that were "unclear,"57 while
the Daily News briefly referred to an AP report of civilian deaths. The Time
correspondent described the "ghastly" sight of the taxis, noting that fourteen
in all had been slaughtered. Correspondent Dean Brelis referred to the
"indiscriminate" bombing of the port city of Tyre, where, with the exception of
one Palestinian anti-aircraft gun, "no military target had been hit. . . What
had been hit, and hard, was the civilian dwellings. Was this deliberate
counter-terrorism on the part of the Israelis? It certainly looked that way."58
Nothing of this was even hinted at in the Times or other U.S. dailies. And the
State Department, which had quickly condemned what it called "a brutal act of
terrorism against Israeli civilians," refused to issue any censure of Israel for
its invasion of Lebanon.

During an Israeli air bombardment of Lebanon the previous November in which
more than 100 civilians were killed, a man in his sixties, as told by an
American newsman, "lost everyone he had in the world at Hazziyeh - his wife, six
children, his brother, his brother's wife, his brother's four children. Numbed
by grief, he walked like a robot around a Palestinian Red Crescent hospital near
Tyre. He knelt among the bodies of his family, crouched over the dirty mutilated
face of his smallest son, kissed him and said, 'Darling, go. It doesn't matter,
God is great.' "59

This man, if possible, was perhaps more fortunate than other defenseless
parents in unarmed Lebanese villages and Palestinian refugee camps upon whom, as
Thomas Kiernan describes in the prologue of The Arabs, American-made Phantoms
showered phosphorous bombs made of wax and acid-wax which stuck to the skin
while the acid ate it away:

A human figure materialized out of the gloom, an eerie, unintelligible chant
issuing from what was once its lips. Stumbling, weaving, then falling to its
knees and crawling, it crept towards us. It was a child-boy or girl I
couldn't tell-and its charred skin was literally melting, leaving a trail of
viscous fluid in its wake. Its face had no recognizable features. The top of
its skull shone through the last layer of scorched membrane on its head. Not
more than ten yards from us it fell on its side, its kneecaps exposing like
the yolks of poached eggs. It twitched once or twice in the dust, gave a
final wheeze, then went still in the puddle of molten flesh that formed
around it in the dust. . . . Later it was run over by a car. No one would
ever know what had happened to that child.60

While the unparalleled destruction in Lebanon has since become a recognized
fact, only the primary cause remaining in contention, the total devastation of
Quneitra, the one-time capital of Syria's Golan [390] [391] Heights, remains one
of the world's best-kept secrets.

Under the terms of the Syrian-Israeli disengagement accord, the return of
Quneitra to the Syrians was the principal quid pro quo for President Hafez
al-Assad's reluctant acceptance of the fruits of Henry Kissinger's thirty~day
shuttling. The southern quarter of the town, the hills surrounding it on three
sides, and the rich cultivated land east, west, and south-still remained in
Israeli hands, allegedly to protect Israeli settlements in the Hulah valley.
Three Israeli settlements built since 1967, in defiance of U.N. resolutions, lay
within four miles of the town. Without these Israeli settlers in the Golan,
Kissinger might have been able to make a more satisfactory arrangement. But as
one settler in Merom Golan boasted, "By our very presence we are proving once
again the importance of settlement to Israel. Where we settle, there we shall
remain."61

The Syrian returnees in June 1967 were greeted by a Hebrew inscription on a
demolished wall: "You wanted Quneitra. You will have it in ruins." This threat
was carried out.

Kurt Waldheim, Secretary-General of the U.N., after visiting the former
capital of the Golan Heights, remarked: "I was very shocked by what I saw at
Quneitra." For the Soviet Ambassador to Syria, Quneitra revived memories of
Stalingrad at the end of the last war. And to Father George Muhassal, when he
and his flock were finally permitted to reenter the city, it was Hiroshima all
over again.

In a statement released through the Near East Ecumenical Bureau in Beirut,
this pastor of the Greek Orthodox Church in Quneitra charged the Israelis with
bulldozing 80 percent of the city and with desecrating-looting Christian
churches and the cemetery just prior to their withdrawal on June 26: "The
concrete tombs were opened by machine~gun fire and, in some cases, hand
grenades. The bodies were brought outside and systematically looted. Hands were
broken off to get bracelets, teeth with gold were taken, and parts of the bodies
were not put back in the proper coffins."

Such accusations coming from a priest of a church in the city might be
dismissed as exaggerations. But Irene Beeson, writing in the Guardian was most
explicit in her description of the systematic Israeli destruction before
leaving. These are the words, as recounted by Beeson, of one of the ten
inhabitants who alone had remained under the Israeli occupation in 1967:

They had about eleven bulldozers stationed in the town, but they had to
bring in reinforcements to cope with the huge task. The smaller houses
collapsedunder a single thrust. For the larger two, three and four-story
villas and buildings, they had to build earth ramps so that the bulldozers
could reach the upper floors.
They worked from dawn to dusk for several days with grim determination and
great expertise. It took them practically a whole day to finish off the
three-story house down the street. Only the houses of the ten Arab
inhabitants who had not fled were intact. Left standing, also, was the
gutted, bullet-ridden 300-bed hospital which the Israelis used for target
practice. One of the town's churches was destroyed. Others left standing and
only slightly damaged structurally, but had been stripped of
everything-marble facings on the walls, furnishings, precious 4th-century
icons, statues, lamps.
The shell of the Officers' Club is another landmark. What remains of this
wall is riddled with bullet holes, decorated with sexy murals, insulting and
pornographic graffiti. . . . Generators were removed and carted away by the
Israelis, who made off with all the town's pumps for drinking and irrigation
water. Into the water reserves and wells the Israelis had poured diesel oil,
petrol and garbage, making good the inscription they had left behind.62

You can always read what others have to say, but that is not the same as
viewing for yourself, as I did a year later, the utter emptiness and desolation
of Quneitra, a city that had been bulldozed in its entirety. The tracks of the
machines were still evident everywhere. Smaller houses had collapsed under a
single thrust, while the larger villas and buildings had obviously been
bulldozed in the manner described by Irene Beeson.

Such dark devastation visited by man upon man has had few equals. The only
signs of life were the stray, hungry-looking cat streaking across the road and a
few wild red poppies that had sprung up beside the burnt-out framework of what
once had been Quneitra's proud hospital. To me came a flashback to childhood:

In Flanders Field the poppies grow
Between the crosses row on row
That mark their place.

My visit to Quneitra was on a cold May afternoon, but the temperature in no
way could match the frigidity of the scene - dramatized by nearby snow-capped
Mount Herman, where so many fierce aerial battles between the Syrians and the
Israelis had occurred. The approaches to Quneitra were guarded by the Austrian
U.N. peacekeeping force.

This tragedy can best be seen through neutral eyes. However, despite
continued widespread coverage of violence and terrorism in the U.S. media, there
were no reports on Quneitra. In July 1974 an Australian delegation comprised of
two members of Parliament, two [392] Labor leaders, two journalists, and the
Federal Secretary of the Young Labor Association visited the Golan Heights.
Leader of the delegation George Petersen wrote an article, "The Town That Used
To Be," for the Australian publication, Nation Review:

The most striking feature of the Quneitra buildings is that, in most cases,
there are no walls and the roofs are resting on the ground. How this was
done is only too apparent by the caterpillar tracks on the ground near the
destroyed buildings.63

After describing the conditions he found in the city, Petersen concluded:

Quneitra was destroyed for the same reasons that most of the original
inhabitants were expelled from Palestine-because the Zionists intend to take
over the land, expel the original inhabitants and use it for their own
purposes. . . Looking across the cease-fire lines to Ain Zivan kibbutz in
Israel, I know whom I would hate the most if I were a native of Quneitra.
Not the soldiers, not even the bulldozer operators, but the men, women and
children living on that kibbutz for the benefit of whom and of others like
them the destruction of Quneitra was instituted at an enormous cost to the
native inhabitants. And I know that I would want to cross the cease-fire
line and kill those usurpers.

In the same publication, many letters from Zionists who knew nothing
whatsoever about Quneitra emotionally reacted to the Petersen article. In a
reply to one of the letters signed by five persons, Petersen struck back:

When I was at Quneitra on July 5, the bulldozer tracks were clearly visible.
I am puzzled why the apologists for the Israeli government deny that
Quneitra was destroyed by bulldozers and explosives! The Israeli practice of
bulldozing Arab villages to the ground is well substantiated in past reports
by such impartial parties as the International Committee of the Red Cross
and the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights. . . . Why should the
Zionists have made an exception of Quneitra? I would particularly like your
five correspondents to explain how they justify the forcible eviction to
Syria of over 100,000 native inhabitants of the Golan Heights area. Does
Israel's right to exist justify turning the civilian residents into homeless
refugees? Or are your correspondents' concepts of humanity confined only to
people who describe themselves as "Jews"?

Zionists contend that Quneitra had been destroyed during the 1967 and 1973
wars rather than methodically bulldozed at the time of the Israeli withdrawal.
But a BBC documentary film showed Commentator Peter Snow some three or four days
before the Israeli evacuation in a very alive city with many houses all
intact-further proof that the [393] city had been calculatingly destroyed, house
by house, church by church.

Another eyewitness from the Australian delegation was Stewart West, President
of the South Post Branch of the Waterside Workers Federation of Australia. Under
the title "The Destruction of Quneitra," he wrote as follows:

In most war-damaged cities, you see heaps of rubble, bomb and shell craters,
burned-out buildings, with walls still standing and sometimes whole streets
left undamaged. But not in Quneitra. The city was completely destroyed in a
couple of days immediately prior to the Israeli withdrawal on June 25, 1974.
Most of the houses were demolished with explosives or pushed down with
bulldozers. . . . The destruction of Quneitra must be in the same
category as the destruction of ancient Carthage, as the destruction of
European cities by the Huns, and the Mongols, and with Hiroshima and the
Nazi destructions during World War II. 64
[Italics added.]

Australian trade union newspaper Scope in a special twenty-eight page
supplement of August 1, 1974, devoted two of its pages to the Quneitra
atrocities with a lead that read: "Syrian city of Quneitra used to be half-way
between the Israeli border and Damascus. In June of this year, Israeli
bulldozers destroyed the last of its houses, ripped down the last of its trees
and orchards and pulled back up the hills of the Golan Heights." The main piece,
presumably written by Scope's Editor, George Coote, added in part:

June 26 was days after the disengagement between Israeli and Syrian troops,
and the last Arab house in Quneitra was destroyed minutes before UN
peacekeeping forces moved in. . . . Quneitra was smashed with dynamite and
bulldozers which made sure nobody would live there again.... This was a
puzzle for the Australian delegation visiting the city. Did the Quneitra
story hit the Australian media?

The answer to this question and to the query posed by British journalist
Kathleen Evan's contribution to the same special issue, "Had You Really Heard
About Israel's Genocide?" was identical. Next to nothing had appeared in
Australia and Britain-and nothing in the U.S.-on the story of a gutted city
where nearly 45,000 people once had happily lived.

Zionist terror also reached the sidewalks of New York. One
Sunday afternoon in January 1972, the relative stillness of Seventh Avenue was
broken by the angry bellow of voices crying out in unison "Free Soviet Jews,"
alternating with "Six Million-Not One More." Carnegie Hall, where the Osipov
Balalaika Orchestra was performing with stars [394] [395] of the Bolshoi Ballet
and the Bolshoi Opera Company, was under siege. Two busloads of Mayor John
Lindsay's police were keeping an angry threatening mob from ticket holders who
had to pass the picket lines to enter the famed music hall.

The ugly, tastelessly clad pickets who were alternately cursing, hissing, and
spitting at other Americans, many of whom were themselves Jews, were members of
Rabbi Meir Kahane's Jewish Defense League. Most of them were wearing buttons
bearing their organizational emblem, "Never Again," while some had buttons
reading "Free Syrian Jews." One woman in a fur coat had a cloth emblem with the
flags of Israel and the U.S. joined together - symbolizing the duality of these
rabid ultramilitants. And on that Sunday miscreants of the same ilk were
picketing the Syrian Mission in another section of Manhattan. That evening the
Egyptian Tourist Office at Rockefeller Center was bombed. And two days later a
fire bombing of "unknown origin" erupted in the offices of impresario Sol Hurok
and Columbia Artists, killing his secretary and injuring many. An anonymous
caller to the Associated Press said: "Cultural bridges of friendship will not be
built over the bodies of Soviet Jews. Never again." On this occasion the leaders
of a few rival Israelist organizations in muffled voices related their
disapproval to the press. But no action was taken, and history was being allowed
to repeat itself.

The case of Meir Kahane would require a long examination. All that may be
noted here is the way he has benefited from the imposition of the double
standard. The five-year suspended sentence given him in 1971 after his admitted
manufacture of bombs, harassment of Soviet diplomats, and acts of violence
against American and Arab citizens was scarcely believable. Only in a Brooklyn
District Court presided over by Judge Jack Weinstein and in an America under
Zionist domination could this have happened.

In a news conference following the sentencing, the brazen Rabbi forthrightly
disavowed the court's injunction against further breaches of the peace by
stating that he would use violence if he determined it to be "necessary." He
announced that he would divide his time between New York and Jerusalem, where he
was opening an international center, and would "maintain dual citizenship as
permitted under Israeli law."

The militant Rabbi vacated the leadership of the group he founded after his
defeat in the December 1973 Israeli parliamentary elections. The Israeli
government deported him after he and other Israeli militants were arrested
following a Gush Emunim demonstration during the summer of 1976 in an off-limits
Hebron hospital on the West Bank. Kahane cried out to his followers living in
the nearby Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba, which looks down on the Arab city
from a promontory: "This is a Jewish city. Abraham lived here, and so will we.
This is the building where Jews were murdered by Arabs." The six-columned New
York Times report on page 2 showed a smiling, charismatic Kahane sitting in an
Israeli army truck after his arrest.65

Upon release from prison in his country of adoption, Kahane returned to the
U.S. to face criminal charges. Convicted, he kept newly enthralled followers in
line through his arrogant behavior from his "country club prison," as he used
his demand for kosher food and religious observance to move freely in and out of
confinement.

His 1975 book, The Story of the Jewish Defense League,66
was reviewed in the Sunday Times book section by Herbert Gold 67 (on the same
page as Elie Wiesel was reviewing The Blood of Israel. The Massacre of the
Israeli Athletes), and the reputedly sensitive novelist referred to Kahane as a
"lively rabbi with a baroque mind" whose "new book, ill-written, shrill and
without nuance, nevertheless gets at a truth about contemporary Jewish
experience which is generally missed by both the un-Jewish popular mind and the
established Jewish organizations." The reviewer found Kahane at times "almost
lovable," supporting the publisher's jacket blurb "that militance is and will be
necessary to assure the future physical and spiritual existence of the Jewish
people."

Little wonder that Kahane and his breed in the JDL, despite an occasional rap
on the knuckles, have been permitted to break the laws, shoot at the innocent,
deface property, and attack with impunity. When Dr. Mohamed Mehdi of the Action
Committee was attacked by JDL members with a lead pipe in May 1974 and sent to
the hospital with a broken back,68 it took
nearly a year for the police to make an arrest although a perpetrator appeared
on television to boast of the deed. This same arrogant defiance of the law was
manifested in an ugly attack on me when I lectured February 5, 1975 at William
Patterson College at Wayne, New Jersey, in a rebuttal to an address made there
by former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban.69
Neither of these incidents received any media attention. Shortly thereafter,
Mehdi's offices on East 44th Street. in Manhattan were set afire and almost
totally gutted. The New York Times relegated this obviously vicious arson to
five short paragraphs on page 40, referring only to a "suspicious fire"
resulting in "medium damage to office equipment."70
Yet this same newspaper had often given prominent coverage to the many Mehdi
demonstrations and his often zany statements which did not put the [396] [397]
Palestinian position in the best light.

Frustration and desperation breed desperation and frustration. The grim
reaction to the devastation suffered by the Palestinians in Jordan in 1970 led
to an increase in violence and in the arenas in which force was applied. There
emerged more desperate and intransigent guerrillas, groups such as the Black
September tied to the internationalist terrorist-revolutionary movement. The
Japanese Red Army, the Bader-Meinhof and other groups cooperated with
Palestinians on whose strong moral position they drew to achieve their own ends
in Europe. terrorist acts served as a sad reminder that these Palestinians just
would not disappear. As Dr. Elmer Berger, expressed it:

Right or wrong, the exploits of the Palestinians stir an Arab world which
knows that if the president of the United States calls them "outlaws," no
power has done more to put these people outside the "law" than the United
States. For no power is as responsible as the United States for Israel's
persistent defiance of the "law" as it has been inscribed in every
international agreement ever written on the Palestine problem."71

The vilification of Palestinians goes forward without placing their terrorism
in the tragic context of the struggle for their right of self determination.
This refusal of Western communications media to relate cause to effect has made
the growth of violence inevitable and the ensuing harrowing conflict in Lebanon
unavoidable. The die was first cast for that lovely country with Israel's
December 1968 reprisal attack on the Beirut Airport.

For this double standard the New York Times must bear a heavy responsibility,
riveting so much attention, as it has, on the subject of terrorism and refusing
(even in a piece "Terrorism or Liberation Struggle? Violence Begets Many New
Nations"72 in which the PLO was discussed
but not a word said about Begin's Irgun) to place any blame on Israel for the
use of violence from the onset of her successful struggle for "legitimacy," but
on every occasion detailing the rise of the PLO through alleged stages of
terrorism.73

In a June 22, 1974, editorial following the Palestinian attack on the Israeli
border villages of Kiryat Shemona, Ma'alot, and Shamir
74 in which fifty-one in all had been
killed, the Times placed the responsibility for the "stepped-up Palestinian
terrorist attacks and Israeli counterattacks" at the door of "die-hard
Palestinian extremists, infuriated by the rapid erosion of the support for their
intransigent stand among their own people as well as in Arab capitals... these
frustrated fanatics have resorted to repeated acts of barbarism in a desperate
effort to reverse the accelerating momentum toward accommodation." (Warned
indeed they were, as were all Palestinians, that there might be a Middle East
accommodation that did not take into consideration their 'inalienable rights.'')

It is the saddest commentary on the decadence of the world in which we live,
that the only way these people could be heard was to launch repeated terrorist
attacks. Who knew about the Palestinians before Munich? Who cared one whit about
the rights of Palestinians before Ma'alot? The answer is obvious-no one! There
have been myriad stories about the poor Jewish refugees from everywhere coming
into Israel and building up "the desert," but what humanitarian pieces broke
into print about the Palestinians who had been thrown out from their ancient
homes, until they struck and struck hard? And did not Winston Churchill in his
History of the English Speaking Peoples once write, "It is in the primary right
of man to fight and to kill for the land they live in."75

Parade compounded the Times' felonies with its own piece: "Terrorists: How
They Operate a World-wide Network" in which it was made to appear that most
terrorism stems solely from the Arab Middle East where "a gusher of Arab oil
money is available" and "President Qaddafi, an unpredictable Big Daddy,
subsidizes terrorism to the tune of $90 million a year.
76 In an October 1976 interview, "Our Very
Existence Depends on the U.S.," with Parade writer George Michaelson, Prime
Minister Rabin complained that the media had blown up the West Bank
demonstrations. The article contained the subhead, "An Exaggerated Picture,"
above reports of Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians, together with a
photograph captioned: "Israeli Soldiers Grab West Bank Rioter."77
But four months later, an expansive, flattering Michaelson outpouring on
President Sadat (the cover showed the Egyptian holding a rose) discussed every
aspect of war and peace in the Middle East without the word "Palestine"
appearing once.78 And in two other
articles dealing with the West Bank problem, this writer further attached the
terrorist label to the Palestinians and dismissed the PLO with an
unsubstantiated blanket statement that "among older, wealthier and more
traditional West Bankers, the PLO's militancy is suspect."79

Few in the media cared to distinguish between terror as carried out by
private groups or individuals and terror as executed as part of governmental
policy. Neither the leaders of the Irgun nor of the Stern Gang had ever been
prosecuted by the Israeli government after the establishment of the state. These
terrorist groups were absorbed into [398] [399] the Israeli army intact as
special units and their leaders elected to the Knesset. And shortly after he
took over as chief of state, Begin issued a postage stamp honoring Abraham
Stern, whose group had helped him in the assault on Deir Yassin and had
masterminded the assassination of U.N. mediator Folke Bernadotte.

As South Dakota Senator James Abourezk noted in a speech on the Senate floor
prior to the Ma'alot incident, the village of Kfeir in South Lebanon where his
parents had been born "was bombed by Israeli Phantoms, fueled by American bombs
and American money." In that attack four civilians had been killed: a
six-month-old baby, a five-year-old and an eight-year~old child, and the mother
of one of the children. Coming two days prior to Ma'alot, the Israelis could not
claim "retaliation." And if ever there were heartrending de~ails that lent
themselves to dramatic rendition, here they were. But no NBC spectaculars, no
New York Times Sunday magazine or Parade renditions ever sobbed out this tale.

Senator Fulbright added his comments to those of his South Dakota colleague,
noting that these persistent attacks cast doubt on Israeli's sincerity for
peace, a capital reason for the U.S. media reticence to publicize Israeli raids
on civilian sites in South Lebanon and on defenseless refugee camps. The
standard Israeli justification for these raids had invariably been to bomb
"terrorists" who had committed previous acts of violence against them. Yet the
"terrorists" who committed the Ma'alot atrocity had died at Ma'alot.

Nor had other Israeli "retaliations" scarcely ever been visited upon those
Palestinians who had perpetrated the provocative raids. Rather, the Israeli
alleged responses" were aimed at eradicating any chance of a peace settlement
according recognition to the Palestinians. A spiraling sequence of violence and
terrorism was hardly likely to muster the respect from the world the displaced
Palestinians so desperately needed in order to win acceptance of their
rights~rights which, if granted, might jeopardize the existing character of the
Israeli state.

What added insult to injury for the handful of protesting Senators was that
these Israeli raids had been all carried out with armaments supplied by the U.S.
through a vote of the very legislative body in which they served. As Senator
Abourezk pointedly reminded his colleagues in the Senate (scarcely reported
outside of the Congressional Record):

If we in the United States are to furnish Phantom jets, bombs, napalm,
fire bombs and money to fuel the planes when they do the bombing and the
killing in southern Lebanon, then we must be held accountable for the deaths
that will result from what I consider to be official Israeli Government
terrorist activities - no less terrorist in nature than an act of three of
four individual Arabs who kill civilians in Israel.
Mr. President, this raises one important question: "Where are the doves
in the United States today who cried and who agonized over the killing in
Vietnam - the killing that was carried out in the very same manner as it is
being done now in souther Lebanon? Where are these people today who
protested that same kind of killing in Indo-China?"
The answer is obvious, Mr. President: They are deathly silent and in some
cases, those very same doves are cheering on the Israelis in their bombing
raids that result in the slaughter of so many innocent people.
80

The significance of the role played by the issue of terror in achieving the
Middle East "cover-up" has been surpassed only by the contribution of the
syndrome of anti-anti-Semitism to the "cover-over," which shall now be examined.

[End of Chapter]

"When a Jew, in America or in South Africa, talks to
his Jewish companions about 'our' government, he means the
government of Israel."